Dialogism or Interconnectedness in the Work of Louise Erdrich [1 ed.] 9781443891837, 9781443886079

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Dialogism or Interconnectedness in the Work of Louise Erdrich

Dialogism or Interconnectedness in the Work of Louise Erdrich By

Marta J. Lysik

Dialogism or Interconnectedness in the Work of Louise Erdrich By Marta J. Lysik This book first published 2017 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2017 by Marta J. Lysik All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-8607-6 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-8607-9



TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ...................................................................................... ix Abbreviations ............................................................................................. xi Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Louise Erdrich and American Indian Literature Dialogism Prefixes Postcolonial Literature? Louise Erdrich: “I prefer to simply be a writer” The structure of the study Chapter I .................................................................................................... 11 Compost Pile and Temporary Storage: Dialogism in Louise Erdrich’s The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse The Novel: Bakhtinian Theory and Erdrich’s Practice Compost Pile and Temporary Storage Dialogue and Orality Tribalography The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse Narrative, Gender, Religion, and the Concept of Trans-Formation Trans—formation #1: Religion and Gender—Sister Cecilia to Agnes DeWitt—The Come-Between Trans—formation #2: Gender and Religion—Agnes DeWitt to Father Damien—The In-Between Trans—formation #3: Religion to Spirituality, and Ethnicity—Father Damien “Converted”—The Go-Between The Potential of Dialogism The Viability of the Novel Conclusion



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Chapter II ................................................................................................... 36 A Portrait of the Artist(s): The Erdrich-Dorris Literary Partnership The Artist’s Craft Stages of the Literary Alliance Stages in the Writing of the Novel The (Im)Materiality of Writing Reading While Writing The Myth of a Writer as a Romantic Genius The Crown of Columbus: “handing the computer disk back and forth.” Re-Visions and New Visions Michael Dorris: Husband, Writer, Editor, Literary Agent After Dorris: Erdrich’s Later Books Conclusion Chapter III ................................................................................................. 61 A Case Study of Three Editions of Love Medicine (1984, 1993, 2009) and Two Editions of The Antelope Wife (1998, 2012) The Quandary of Tracks Re—visions as Dialogue Love Medicine: The 1984 and 1993 versions Alterations to the “Wild Geese” Chapter Added Chapters “The Island” “The Beads” “Resurrection” “The Tomahawk Factory” and “Lyman’s Luck” The 1993 and 2009 editions “The Island” “The Beads” Cosmetic Changes? The Antelope Wife The 1998 and 2012 editions Atonement Resistance and Agency Politics, Power and Cultural Knowledge Languages The Craft of Writing and Beading Conclusion



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Chapter IV ................................................................................................. 89 “Nursing a baby while holding a pen”: Ink & Milk; Writing, Reading & Motherhood; Production and Re—production Autobiography/Memoir The Blue Jay’s Dance Conception Pregnancy/Gestation Labor/Birth Caring Continuity and Natural Universe Mothers in the Novels Unconventional Parenthood in the Novels Fatherhood in the Novels: Father’s Milk Michael Dorris’ Autobiographical Writing and Activism The Crown of Columbus by Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich: Joint Writing, Joint Parenthhood Other Mothers and Fathers Writing Lists of Literary (Fore)Mothers Fellow Writer, Fellow Mother: Elif Shafak Books as Babies Late Motherhood in Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country Book-islands Home Library Organizing the Overflow and the Surplus: Lists, Catalogues, Enumerations Birchbark Books & Native Arts Birchbark Blog, Facebook Page and The Birchbark House Fund Conclusion Chapter V ................................................................................................ 123 A Tetralogy, or One Long Book? “Power travels in the bloodlines, handed out before birth” (T 31): Bloodlines, Knots, and Tangles One Long Book Narrative Fabric Inter—active Exercises in Reading 1. Love Medicine, Tracks, Four Souls, The Bingo Palace, Tales of Burning Love, The Painted Drum, and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. Love Medicine (1984) Tracks (1988)



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Four Souls (2004) The Bingo Palace (1994) Tales of Burning Love (1996) The Painted Drum (2005) 2. The Beet Queen and The Master Butchers Singing Club The Beet Queen (1986) The Master Butchers Singing Club (2003) 3. The Plague of Doves (2008), The Round House (2012) and LaRose (2016) Conclusion Chapter VI ............................................................................................... 148 “Equivalence in difference”? Dialogic Acts of Translation in The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse Theories of Translation The Violence of Polarity vs. the Logic of Continuity and Trans— formation Sister Cecilia/Agnes DeWitt/Father Damien Nanapush Translation and Warfare The Language of Music Translation and Decolonization Translation and Conversion Conclusion Coda ........................................................................................................ 168 Works Cited ............................................................................................. 172 Index ........................................................................................................ 182





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to thank the CSP for all their help and hard work on the manuscript. This study, compiled from years of study, observation, writing, reading, talking, and thinking owes its existence to the support of several institutions and many individuals whose intellectual integrity as well as kindness helped me to bring this project to completion. This book has three mothers to thank: my Doktormutter, Prof. Eva Boesenberg; Ewa Maria Slaska, who adopted me, and my biological mother Zofia. Without their wisdom, generosity, patience, support, mentoring, and kindness, I would not be who I am and this dissertation would never have materialized. Tausend Dank and dziĊkujĊ piĊknie! This book also has a father, my dad Ignacy, whose unwavering support I will never be able to repay. I feel indebted to the professors and scholars whom I met over the years during conferences, summer schools, colloquia and other events, who read earlier versions and parts of the manuscript, or heard me talk about it, and provided feedback. I know I did not accept criticism gracefully, but I’m learning to do so and please know your comments made sense eventually. Specifically, I would like to thank Werner Sollors from Harvard University, whose kindness and help over the years will never be forgotten – vielen, vielen Dank! To fellow instructors, colleagues and Ph.D. students at the American Studies Department of the Humboldt Universität in Berlin, in particular Martin Klepper, Markus Heide, Reinhard Isensee, Renate Ulbrich, Suncica Ozretic-Klaas, Claudia Holler, Sigrid Venuß – a heartfelt thanks for ensuring a friendly atmosphere and for many inspiring moments. I am especially grateful to my former students at Humboldt (in the years of 2006-2013), too many to name all, who, while I was teaching them, were teaching me as well. Several chapters were drafted while I was on a research and teaching fellowship at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis 2008-2009. Professor Shaden Tageldin read early drafts of two chapters and greatly helped this fledgling project in its formative stages. She helped me unpack and develop certain ideas within the framework of her seminars which were pure wisdom as well as pure pleasure. My project has benefited



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immensely from that year which was funded by a fellowship from the Humboldt Universität in Berlin and the University of Minnesota. I am a learner. I majored in three different subjects, studied in three different countries at six different institutions. A big thank you and much appreciation goes to my past teachers and mentors who accompanied me from elementary school, through high school, till university. They are too numerous to list here, but they are well-remembered for their wisdom, sympathy, encouragement, inspiration, and often humor. I have been a teacher myself for years now and am everyday realizing what a challenge it is to be a good one! DziĊkujĊ, danke schön, thank you! This study also owes its existence to the financial support that I have received. I want to acknowledge the DAAD, via Humboldt Universität, for granting me a research fellowship to finish the dissertation (“Abschlussstipendium”) when I most needed it and which allowed me to quit my multiple jobs and to focus on writing exclusively. A major thank you goes to professor Merritt Moseley who did much more than just proofread the manuscript (any mistakes are mine). Thank you for your kind guidance over the years. Words of gratitude for a good working environment also go to my fellow colleagues in the Department of Journalism and Social Communication at the University of Wroclaw – dziĊkujĊ Wam bardzo! I want to thank my closest friends, although some of them are now based away from where I live, for their consistent belief in me and for occasional distractions while I was working on this project. You are my family as well!





ABBREVIATIONS

AW 98 AW 2012 BIOC BJD BP CC FS LM 84 LM 93 LM 2009 LR T TBL





The Antelope Wife, 1998 The Antelope Wife: A Novel. New and Revised Edition, 2012 Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country, 2003 The Blue Jay’s Dance, 1995 The Bingo Palace, 1994 The Crown of Columbus (by Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich), 1991 Four Souls, 2004 Love Medicine, 1984 Love Medicine: Revised Edition, 1993 Love Medicine: Newly Revised Edition, 2009 The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, 2001 Tracks, 1988 Tales of Burning Love, 1996

INTRODUCTION LOUISE ERDRICH AND AMERICAN INDIAN LITERATURE

This is a study devoted to an exploration of selected works by Louise Erdrich and the way she works as a writer, mother, and bookstore founder and owner. It is suggestive, not exhaustive, as Erdrich is a prolific writer and to analyze her entire oeuvre and address its formal and thematic scope would yield several volumes. My aim is to portray how Erdrich’s work extends Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism significantly beyond the original idea. The introduction, in addition to defining the dialogic principle, presents this contemporary writer and explains my motivation to write about her, as well as delineating the contents and the organization of this study. This study aims to formulate, theorize, and apply the logic of dialogism, as articulated by Mikhail Bakhtin, to the works and nonpareil writing practice of Louise Erdrich, who re—writes 1 the genre of a novel. The objective is also to demonstrate how the novel characteristics (the form) are inter—woven with and reflected by the thematic scope of her work (the content): the multifacetedness and open-ended quality of the narrative fabric are paired with multiple metamorphoses of the dynamic protagonists. The underlying logic of this study being the Bakhtinian concepts of the novel and of dialogism, I wish to underscore the intricacies of the narrative texture and the selected protagonists’ identities, both works-in-progress, accentuating the process and the dialogues, not the outcome. I intend to show that Erdrich extends the dialogue: by looking at selected novels and new editions of two novels, by including an analysis of her autobiographical writing, and by quoting from interviews with her and Michael Dorris.

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I use a dash on purpose instead of a hyphen. The logic of this gesture will be explained when writing about prefixes.

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Introduction

Dialogism What is dialogism? How to pinpoint its fluid character? As an appendix to their translation of Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination, Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist present a glossary of Bakhtinian terms in an attempt to facilitate the adoption and assimilation of his theories. They understand “dialogism” to be “the characteristic epistemological mode of a world dominated by heteroglossia. Everything means, is understood, as a part of a greater whole—there is a constant interaction between meanings, all of which have the potential of conditioning others” (“Glossary” 426). It is a mode which advocates parity of experiences based on a dialogue, be it between individuals, religions, spiritual practices, sexes, nationalities, or ideologies. This study attempts a critical survey of Erdrich’s selected works from a dialogic angle. I will strive to foreground different dialogues at work, and therefore different dimensions, also generic, of Erdrich’s work. By analyzing the textual fabric of Erdrich’s memoirs and novels, I intend to demonstrate that Erdrich’s dialogic re—writing, co—writing, and writing practices correspond with the thematic and formal dialogisms of her novels. This study is not a veiled biographical project, but an attempt to view the selected literary works as one entity while paying attention to its singular elements, among them the writer’s insights into the processes of writing and reading. In “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel” (a chapter in The Dialogic Imagination), Bakhtin draws a distinct line between the textual (“the world represented in the work” 253) and material reality (“the actual world as source of representation” 253) and warns the readers not to confuse the two and not to engage in “naïve realism;” not to identify the “author-creator” with the person of the author (“naïve biographism” 253). These will be the traps I will try to evade when arguing my theses. Erdrich denies her novels are autobiographical, yet they stand in a strange, almost counterintuitive, but dialogic inter—action, when she does admit she has used conversations and episodes she witnessed or experienced and weaves them into the texture of her novels: “I never hear stories that go into my work, although place description might. Just germs of stories, and most of those I hear from my father. I’ve internalized my father to such a degree that sometimes he has only to start a few sentences and my mind races off” (Halliday 2010). People sometimes ask whether she has experienced everything she writes about, but she says laughing “Are you crazy? I’d be dead. I’d be dead fifty times. I don’t write directly from my own experience so much as an emotional understanding of it” (Halliday 2010).

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I am re—reading Bakhtin through Erdrich in order to see how her contemporary novels might interrogate and complement a theory that is almost a century old. I will harness Bakhtin’s theoretical approach in order to posit dialogism in Erdrich’s oeuvre, emphasizing the importance of the whole and the inter—dependence and parity of its constituents. The aim is to take Bakhtin’s theorizations of dialogism a notch further and include Erdrich’s practice of writing, co—writing, re—writing and, not least, reading novels in this study. Erdrich’s version of dialogism is very comprehensive and reaches beyond what Bakhtin argued. Her open-ended work strives for logic in variety. Although the novel’s characteristics have been employed by numerous other writers, the entirety of her oeuvre and writing practice, featuring e.g. series-like writing, re—cycling protagonists, heteroglossia, polyglossia, shared authorship, blogging about books and recent Facebooking about political activism, constitutes Erdrich’s dialogic and idiosyncratic modus operandi.

Prefixes I posit that Erdrich’s work engages in multiple dialogues: it is inter—faith and inter—gender, inter—generic, inter—lingual and intra—lingual, inter—textual and intra—textual. Initially, I employed a hyphen (“-”), but decided it was not enough visually. A hyphen stands for connecting, while I needed something to symbolize an interruption which a dash can stand for. I write these terms with a dash (“—”) in a gesture of intervention, or implicitly with a double hyphen (“--” ) in a gesture of connection, to draw the attention to the prefixes: “inter—” and “intra—” and their meaning of “betweenness,” hinting at the dialogic. I will also apply the logic to other prefixes: “re—,” signaling a repetition, doing something new in dialogue with the older version; “co—,” depicting a joint, therefore dialogical effort; and “trans—,” depicting a phenomenon of reaching across and beyond; also in order to pinpoint the inherently dialogic quality taken for granted when terms with these prefixes are spelled as one continuous word. Throughout this study, by separating certain words with a long dash I attempt to re—invest the subordinated and silenced prefix with meaning, to re—claim its capacity by highlighting its dialogic potential when applied to describe the entirety of Louise Erdrich’s writing practice.

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Introduction

Postcolonial Literature? Another intervention is to ask whether Native American fiction is postcolonial fiction? I think there is no doubt about the existence of a colonial encounter and logic in the history of North America, as “Colonialism involved territorial, economic, political and cultural subjugation, appropriation and exploitation of another country and people. Colonialism was not restricted to the countries and peoples of the ‘Third World,’ but also applied to other contexts” (Wolf 127). The quandary, however, is located in the prefix “post” and whether it denotes sequentiality or polarity, in other words the question is whether the emphasis is temporal, and whether colonialism is over in this context; or dichotomous, the stress falling on opposition and resistance. I suggest that the prefix be invested with agential meaning, more antinomian than temporal, for colonialism with regard to American Indians is an ongoing phenomenon, entailing a “continuing process of resistance and reconstruction” (Wolf 129).

Louise Erdrich: “I prefer to simply be a writer” Karen Louise Erdrich was born in 1954 in Little Falls, Minnesota, and grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota where her parents, Ralph Erdrich and Rita Gourneau Erdrich, taught in a school governed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. She is the oldest of seven children and of Turtle Mountain Ojibwe 2 , German, and French-Canadian ancestry. She “writes from a vantage point in-between . . . cultures,” where “both her German as well as her Native backgrounds have influenced her writing and kindled her need for storytelling,” as Caroline Rosenthal notes (107). Regarding her heritage, upbringing, and university education, she can be positioned at multiple intersections: “Native American and Euro-American (French and German), Ojibwe and Catholic, North Dakota and New England, Turtle Mountain Reservation and Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars” (Morace 37). Erdrich was among the first women to enter Dartmouth College in 1972. That year marked the introduction of a new program in Native American Studies founded and headed by Michael Dorris (Modoc) at Dartmouth. She majored in English and Creative Writing initially. It was not until later,

 2

Several designations to name the tribe are employed by scholars, critics, and laypeople: Chippewa, Ojibwa, Ojibway, Chippeway. But, as the writer and literary scholar David Treuer (Leech Lake Ojibwe) puts it: “Ojibwe is our name for ourselves” (Rez Life 4).

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curious and willing to learn more about her Ojibwe background, she took classes in the program. Her father gave her a nickel for every story she wrote as a child, mostly about “Lonely girls with hidden talents” (Halliday 2010). They have maintained a lifetime of correspondence: My father is my biggest literary influence. Recently I’ve been looking through his letters. He was in the National Guard when I was a child and whenever he left, he would write to me, he wrote letters to me all through college, and we still correspond. His letters, and my mother’s, are one of my life’s treasures. (Halliday 2010)

The letters were about life and its little wonders, such as Mushroom hunting. Roman stoics. American Indian Movement politics. Longfellow. Stamp collecting. Apples. He and my mother have an orchard. He used to talk about how close together meadowlarks sit on fence posts— every seventh fence post. Now, of course, they are rare. When I went off to college, he wrote about the family, but in highly inflated terms, so that whatever my sisters and brothers were doing seemed outrageously funny or tragic. If my mother bought something it would be a cumbersome, dramatic addition to the household, but of course unnecessary. If the dog got into the neighbor’s garbage it would be a saga of canine effort and exertion–and if the police caught the dog it would be a case of grand injustice. (Halliday 2010)

Erdrich is of multiple backgrounds, therefore the issue of choice is a poignant one. Rosenthal states that straddling cultures can be a doubleedged sword: “on the one hand, part of being mixed blood involves having a choice—to a certain extent—over which ethnic group you want to be part of. On the other hand, ethnic background is a shaping force of your existence, which you cannot simply walk away from” (108). Her literary work resists clear-cut taxonomies and contests the notion of a monolithic American Indian identity. Erdrich’s writing is often claimed as American Indian, but the author has reservations about it: “I don’t think American Indian literature should be distinguished from mainstream literature. Setting it apart and saying that people with special interest might read this literature sets Indians apart too” (Coltelli 25). Her writing aims at being dialogic, by including dialogues between different experiences, white and Ojibwe, and between forms, the novel and oral storytelling. Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris’ co—operation was not only marital and domestic, but also literary. They have read, commented on and edited each other’s manuscripts. Dorris stated that the cultural work their

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fiction attempts is to do away with harmful stereotypes and clichés of American Indians, “for any stereotyping simplifies individuals and invariably limits their freedom” (Chavkin and Feyl Chavkin, “Introduction” xii-xiii). In order to prevent stereotypical and harmful visual representations of Native American culture, the writers defended their right to approve the covers of international editions of their novels. Erdrich’s approach towards labeling can be thus summarized: I think of any label as being both true and a product of a kind of chauvinistic society because obviously white male writers are not labeled “white male writers” . . . But I really don’t like labels. While it is certainly true that a good part of my background, and Michael’s background, and a lot of the themes are Native American, I prefer to simply be a writer. Although I like to be known as having been from the Turtle Mountain Chippewa and from North Dakota. It’s nice to have that known and to be proud of it for people back home. (Wong, “An Interview” 31)

Assigning identities and loyalties based on an author’s ethnic background is problematic. Dorris seconded that when asked how he wished to be labeled: It adds a level of complication to say that you are a Native American writer because it sets up expectations in readers which you may or may not fulfill for them. Then they like or don’t like what you’ve written based on whether you’ve fulfilled their expectations. One would hope that one gets a reputation for writing with some sensitivity about the subjects one deals with. And if it were just a question of whether this person is a Native American and also a writer, fine. But “Native American writer” strikes me as a little cumbersome. (Wong, “An Interview” 32)

The label “Native American” triggers questionable expectations and foreknowledge, for mostly they are based on stereotypes which can potentially obscure the idiosyncratic writing practice of the writer thus labeled. While discussing Love Medicine, Erdrich demarcated her priorities: “The people are first, their ethnic background is second” (Grantham 14). She articulates a preference for being included in the American literary tradition: “Being Indian is something we’re terribly proud of. On the other hand, I suppose that in general sense I would rather that Native American writing be seen as American writing, that all of the best writing of any ethnic group here would be included in American writing” (White and Burnside 111). Asked whether one of the goals of her writing was to “undermine not only racist ideas but also romantic notions many people

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have about Native Americans,” she says she hopes that will happen “as a result of a reader following a story in which Native people were portrayed as complex and unpredictable” (Feyl Chavkin and Chavkin, “An Interview with Louise Erdrich” 231). Ambivalence, complexity and unpredictability are inherent to dialogism and are key words when it comes to Erdrich’s writing. Louis Owens (Choctaw-Cherokee) defines Erdrich’s work also in terms of accessibility. Readers from all backgrounds are invited to identify with the protagonists, without compromising the specific context: Erdrich does not ignore the racism and brutality of Euramerica’s dealing with Indian people, but for the first time in a novel by a Native American author, she makes the universality of Indian lives and tragedies easily accessible to non-Indian readers. Kashpaws and Morriseys and Lazarres and Lamartines are people readers can identify with much more easily and closely than they can with an Archilde, Abel, or Tayo. These tangled lives are not so radically different from the common catastrophes of mainstream Americans, certainly no more so than those dreamed up by Faulkner or Fitzgerald. And yet no reader can come away from Love Medicine without recognizing the essential Indianness of Erdrich’s cast and concerns. (Owens 65)

The narrative entanglements Erdrich portrays, especially in Love Medicine, as Helen Jaskoski argues, are reminiscent of Faulknerian methods. The novel, “like the sagas of the Compsons and the Snopeses, aims at a complex rendering of the intricate and far-reaching minglings and conflicts and interlocking fates among people of differing races and culture groups, all of whom feel a deep sense of their ties to the land and to their history upon it” (Jaskoski 33). Erdrich’s writing is widely read and acknowledged because it concerns shared human experiences such as relationships, and because it underscores the messiness, the ambivalence, the risks, the pain and, most important of all, the beauty thereof. As Owens puts it: “Though the frailty of lives and relationships and the sense of loss for Indian people rides always close to the surface of her stories, Erdrich’s emphasis in all her novels is upon those who survive in a difficult world” (54). She is not accusatory in her writing, but respectful of both cultures, not perpetuating stereotypes of victimhood, yet cognizant of the problematic history of one culture trying to annihilate, or at least to colonize the other (Gondor-Wiercioch 77); of the history of deprivation and dislocation. Erdrich includes instead of alienating, describes and sympathizes instead of judging, which makes her an internationally respected and popular author, her work crossing topographies, ideologies, ethnic identities, and belief systems. This is how I, as a non-Native

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American reader, found my entry into her writing. I unravel the complexity of her novels, especially as pertaining to the protagonists and the situations, as I live and experience relationships. No wonder it was not love at first reading. In my twenties, I was ignorant and arrogant. It was only a decade later after I had been through several crises of my own, that I learned to appreciate her stories. Her writing has potential for inspiration, for non-invasive edification, or as Bennett posits that: “Erdrich presents truths—some ugly and some beautiful—with humor and grace. She leaves us with hope” (Bennett, “A Review of The Bingo Palace” 88). In addition, the quality of her writing, what Deborah Madsen terms “the aesthetics of Mino Bimaadiziwin” (1), or “the good life” in Ojibwe (6), helped me appreciate and adapt Erdrich’s writing for my own reading purposes. The “good life” happens in spite or because of hardships, or as Madsen states: “even though opportunities for living well, with courage, generosity and kindness are limited for her characters, many of who are of mixed native and European descent, [they] live under conditions of colonization and within a history of physical and cultural genocide” (Madsen 2). Erdrich herself defined the concept of “Mino Bimaadiziwin” in her 2009 Dartmouth commencement address as: “Knowledge with courage. Knowledge with Fortitude. Knowledge with Generosity and Kindness . . . knowledge without compassion is dead knowledge. Beware of knowledge without love” (Madsen 6). It is the good life in spite of drawbacks and thanks to the survivalist properties of her characters, negotiating Ojibwe life in the context of troubled US-Native history and relations (Madsen 13), which attract readers and critical acclaim, and “[i]n contrast to many other Native American writers, Louise Erdrich’s work is read and received as Native and as mainstream American literature” (Rosenthal 3). Erdrich is a recognized writer; I do not have to prove her skill to the world. The Plague of Doves was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2009. In November 2012 she won the National Book Award in Fiction for The Round House, a novel also named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She commenced her acceptance speech in Ojibwe to honor her people and her daughter Persia, who is studying to become an Ojibwe immersion schoolteacher. Erdrich’s present loyalties are thus made clear, even if her identity is an amalgam of influences, subject to ambiguity. She can be specific in her writing and sound accessible at the same time, which warms the audiences to her. Perhaps the solution is not to categorize her writing in order to evade any generalizations, and as a peaceful gesture defying the colonial logic of describing the world and its manifestations on a two-color, two-pole model. Her newly published book LaRose (2016)

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constitutes the last element of a trilogy also consisting of The Plague of Doves and The Round House (see McGrath; Ogle), or as she says in The New Yorker This book is the last of three books I’ve written about justice. The first, “The Plague of Doves,” is about wild justice (revenge); the second, “The Round House,” is about justice denied (sexual violation, tangled jurisdictions); and this last book deals with natural justice, a reparation of the heart, an act that has old roots in indigenous culture. (Treisman)

The structure of the study The first chapter elucidates the phenomenon of the novel and its dialogic qualities as theorized by Mikhail Bakhtin and as applied by Louise Erdrich in one of her novels The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. The following two chapters will be devoted to the application of the dialogic principle to Erdrich’s literary production and re—production. The second chapter portrays Erdrich as an author who wrote some of her novels in close co—operation and dialogue with another author; thus re— defining the very practice of writing a novel. Writing is usually considered a solitary activity, but Erdrich has shared it with her late husband Michael Dorris. While a few examples exist of writers who are married and edit each other’s writing, who discuss, give advice and critique, for example Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon, or Siri Hustvedt and Paul Auster, I will argue that Erdrich’s co—writing routine was unusually comprehensive, albeit problematic at times. While a published book is usually considered the final stage, Erdrich has re—written her novels. In the third chapter, I will trace the logic of dialogism in Erdrich’s practice of re—writing by analyzing Love Medicine (three versions) and The Antelope Wife (two versions), and tracing the alterations, the dialogues between different versions of the same, yet different novel. Erdrich’s two memoirs The Blue Jay’s Dance and Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country foreground writing, reading, and mothering, and will be analyzed in the fourth chapter, exploring the dialogic rapport between creative and procreative, productive, and re—productive processes and bringing to the fore gestatory vocabulary used for both of these activities, i.e. mothering and writing, such as birth, conception, labor, gestation, or fertility. Next, I will tackle her novelistic oeuvre tracing dialogues on the thematic and narrative levels. The fifth chapter will deal with Erdrich’s North Dakota tetralogy which evolved into “one long book” (Erdrich, “Author’s Note” 5) and other books in the series, taking a closer look at

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Introduction

structural and narrative characteristics of the texts and at re—cycled themes. I will thus argue that a singular ecology of writing is employed by Erdrich. I will highlight several striking examples of dialogism in Erdrich’s novels and thus will reiterate the potential nestled in the genre and in its dialogic stance, i.e. the potential to engage in a mutually respectful relationship without eradicating or obfuscating the differences between the speakers. The sixth chapter will trace the metaphorics of translation as a dialogic exercise portrayed in Erdrich’s novels, and I will capitalize on the shift in the practice: from that of forced imitation (resembling colonial encounters) to that of trans—formation (reminiscent of a dialogue between equals). I will tackle translation literally and thematically, quoting germane passages from Erdrich’s novel The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. I subscribe to the project of ridding translation of its alleged secondariness. Translation, though chronologically preceded by a text in a different language, is not merely re—producing the text, and thus of a lesser quality. A published novel is not the final stage, epitomizing absolute perfection, but a work-in-progress potentially awaiting an afterlife, i.e. being translated into other languages to foster dissemination. The coda will conclude this study by elaborating on Erdrich’s novelistic vision, i.e. concepts of dialogism and inter—connectedness in her novels resulting in an open-ended, multi-voiced, and evolving compost pile of an oeuvre.

CHAPTER I COMPOST PILE AND TEMPORARY STORAGE: DIALOGISM IN LOUISE ERDRICH’S THE LAST REPORT ON THE MIRACLES AT LITTLE NO HORSE

Louise Erdrich’s writing re—defines theories of the novel. Erdrich’s novels focus on multiple individuals, rather than on one protagonist. She writes a series of novels which grows, as it builds novels on novels and from novels. What is her motivation to probe the limits of the genre? By imbuing the novels with oral quality, she makes her novelistic writing become more responsive to and dialogic with Ojibwe tradition. By experimenting with open-endedness and dialogism, she addresses the restrictions of the novel as a genre.

The Novel: Bakhtinian Theory and Erdrich’s Practice Mikhail Bakhtin, one of the major figures of twentieth-century literary theory, a philosopher of language and a literary critic, outlined his ideas in works such as Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1929, 1963), Rabelais and His World (1965), and The Dialogic Imagination (published as a whole in 1975). For political reasons, Bakhtin’s major works were not disseminated and widely read until after the 1960s. His ideas continue to pollinate minds and are applied in literary criticism and linguistics. In his seminal work The Dialogic Imagination he asserts that the novel is a genre which does not lend itself facilely to the practice of taxonomy: “experts have not managed to isolate a single definite, stable characteristic of the novel” (8). Attempts at cataloging this nebulous genre can stymie its potential. How then does he define this most protean of genres? Bakhtin was trying to identify some characteristics of the novel by comparing it with the epic genre. Unlike the epic, the novel is not concerned with “a national epic past,” “the national tradition,” and “an absolute epic distance [which]

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separates the epic world from contemporary reality” (Bakhtin 13). An entity in itself, a non-divisible, impenetrable, impermeable, and organic whole, the epic does not invite polemic, nor any other form of a dialogue: “the epic past is absolute and complete. It is as closed as a circle; inside it everything is finished, already over. There is no place in the epic world for any open-endedness, indecision, indeterminacy” (Bakhtin 16). The novel is everything an epic is not; it is its foil insofar as it is malleable, inconclusive, and situated in the unheroic present, which “is something transitory, it is flow, it is an eternal continuation without beginning or end; it is denied an authentic conclusiveness and consequently lacks an essence as well” (Bakhtin 20). It can have no ending, instead it can suggest mere beginnings, promising a series of novels for example. The novel embraces and welcomes, unlike the epic world which demands reverence and creates distance. The epic is a genre glorifying the rigid past, whereas the novel capitalizes on the pliable present, the now where anything still can happen. What then is the poetics of the novel? To theorize a nebulous genre embedded in a fluid reality renders the task ostensibly impossible. The potential of the novel resides in its “basic structural characteristics,” which indicate the trans—formations the novel can undergo (Bakhtin 11). These characteristics, according to Bakhtin, are: 1. “stylistic three-dimensionality . . . linked with the multi-languaged consciousness realized in the novel” (11); in other words, heteroglossia and polyglossia respectively; 2. “the radical change it [the novel] effects in the temporal coordinates of the literary image” (11) as it does away with the absolutes, and as it places emphasis on the less heroic quality of the quotidian present; 3. “the new zone opened by the novel for structuring literary images . . . the zone of maximal contact with the present . . . in all its openendedness” (11); These characteristics signal the dialogic quality, and in his essay “The Epic and the Novel” Bakhtin introduces a concept of the novel as a dialogic representation of reality. Bakhtin posits that “the novelistic whole” is composed of “heterogeneous stylistic unities,” e.g. “stylization of the various forms of oral everyday narration,” “stylization of the various forms of semiliterary (written) everyday narration (the letter, the diary, etc.),” “various forms of literary but extra-artistic authorial speech (moral, philosophical or scientific statements, oratory, ethnographic descriptions,

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memoranda and so forth),” “stylistically individualized speech of characters” (262). The novel is thus heteroglot and inter—generic. A synthesis of these elements constitutes a particular novel, as “the style of a novel is to be found in the combination of its styles; the language of a novel is the system of its ‘languages’ ” (Bakhtin 262). The novel, stylistically dialogic and in dialogue with the open-ended, unheroic and quotidian present, can thus be viewed as a work-in-progress.

Compost Pile and Temporary Storage The “compost pile” and “temporary storage” are metaphors Erdrich employs to talk about her writing. For a long time, she did not realize she was writing a series of related stories (Feyl Chavkin and Chavkin 234). Asked whether she would term her writing “an organic whole,” Erdrich replied: “It’s more like a compost pile” (Feyl Chavkin and Chavkin 240). The implication of the “organic whole” is that it is pure and integral, perhaps complete, whereas the “compost pile” refers to a phenomenon that has an unfinished quality, is rotting and developing, will never be whole. It is capable of accommodating everything that the “organic whole” would reject. A regular compost pile consists of organic matter which is supposed to disintegrate, to decompose and re—combine, thus creating something new altogether. Erdrich’s ecological concerns will be addressed in the chapter analyzing her memoir The Blue Jay’s Dance, so suffice it to say that she is ecology-oriented in her work as well as in life. The books she publishes are temporary versions, they are subject to change if she chooses to re—write them, to add or to delete, to edit them as her artistic vision dictates her to. She revised her first novel Love Medicine (1984) twice and published the new editions in 1993 and 2009. She radically re—wrote The Antelope Wife (1998) and published it in 2012. “There is no reason to think of publication as a final process. I think of it as a temporary storage” (Feyl Chavkin and Chavkin 232), Erdrich says. She does not employ the word commonly associated with “final,” namely “outcome,” but chooses to imbue her expression with an oxymoronic twist: “a final process.” It is not irrelevant that her writing career commenced with poems, which then grew into short stories, which in turn became novels. For her this was a logical development: “The best short stories contain novels. Either they are densely plotted, with each line an insight, or they distill emotions that could easily spread on for pages, chapters” (Erdrich, “Introduction” xiv). Her publications, compost pilelike, not only organically evolve from smaller forms, as if Erdrich is

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testing ideas to be later expounded on, but, unlike those of many other authors, her works are also parts of an oeuvre in constant gestation: a sagalike series of novels irreverent of chronology.

Dialogue and Orality The compost pile stands for the continuity and trans—formation, and is thus reminiscent of oral storytelling. Erdrich re—writes the novel (a Western genre) and adapts it trans—culturally to her own purposes, investing the form with the characteristics stemming from oral traditions (Gondor-Wiercioch 32) and with Native American themes. Orality pervades Erdrich’s novels: “There’s also a very real feeling of oral history in your novels, as if your characters are real people saying to your readers, ‘sit down, I’m going to tell you a story’ ” (Schumacher 175). I view “oral” and “written” as categories of continuity, not in opposition. A story or stories, even when written down, can still be told to an audience. Erdrich grew up surrounded by storytellers in her family and stories they narrated. Before commencing to write, she and Dorris talked, formed a story orally. Asked whether she considers herself “a poet or a storyteller,” she replies: “Oh, a storyteller, a writer” (Coltelli 23), treating these two functions as synonymous. Native Americans have “a long tradition of oral literature . . . [existing] in a tradition of performances . . . of songs, story, beliefs, and traditional forms rather than to a presentation of a static text” (Quennet 3132). These performances are doubly dialogic: they rely on the relationship between a teller and an audience, and the narrative is revised as it is told and re—told (Quennet 32). Each narrated story is one of a kind, it never comes out the same. Similarly, her stories are without closure. Anytime Erdrich pleases she can come back to them, pick up the thread and continue with the story. Schoeffel observes that The Antelope Wife and other novels by Erdrich “tell variations of the same story over and over, in an attempt to heal the communal wounds caused by the violence of the past and present times” (89-90). Stories of parenthood, of love, of clashes between Native American and white value and belief systems preserve the memory of things past in order to influence the present tense of Native America.

Tribalography LeAnne Howe claims stories entail creation: “Native stories are power. They create people. They author tribes. America is a tribal creation story, a tribalography” (29). However, she laments the fact that Western tradition

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privileges writing and text over story-telling (Howe 40). The term she coins, tribalography, is inherently dialogic, inter—connecting and “comes from the Native propensity for bringing things together, for making consensus, and for symbiotically connecting one thing to another” (Howe 42), i.e. the tribal matters with the need to record them for future generations’ edification (the suffix “-graphy” denoting “writing” and “field of study”). In light of this definition, Erdrich is a tribalographer, her dialogic writing inter—weaves tribal themes, inter—connects people, history (past with the present), events, places, animals, and plants. At this point, we can extend the notion of dialogism to include the concept of the “good life” mentioned in the introduction and the idea of inter— connectedness, as the organizing principles of Erdrich’s work and works. Her writing is an antidote to uprootedness and disconnectedness, to separation and self-absorption ubiquitous nowadays. Tribalographies, or Native American stories, be they in the form of a novel, poem, drama, memoir, film, or history, are dialogic and add “elements together of the storyteller’s tribe, meaning the people, the land, and multiple characters and all their manifestations and revelations, and connect these in past, present, and future milieus (present and future milieus mean non-Indians)” (Howe 42). In other words, tribalography is also inter—cultural, it is “a story that links Indians and non-Indians” (Howe 46). It is part and parcel of American literature, of America’s “literary and literal past” (Howe 46).

The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse How does Erdrich construct and understand the novel-cum-tribalography? How does she give shape to the least formulaic of genres? Let me begin not with her first novel published in the 80s, but in medias res by investigating this synecdochically on the basis of The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (referred to as The Last Report for brevity’s sake), a novel published in 2001. In view of any novel’s incompleteness, “The problems of a beginning, an end, and ‘fullness’ of plot are posed anew” (Bakhtin 31). These categories become more fluid and are determined by writers themselves and also by readers. Leaps in space and time are the hallmark of Erdrich’s fiction. The reader is asked to time-travel and connect the events him/herself. Some chapters in The Last Report are dated 1996, some 1910, 1912, 1919, or 1922, some narrate spans, such as 1910-1912, 1913-1919. Little temporal security is offered, and the reader has to be alert to realize what year it is, and to figure out what is happening in the novel. The reader is invited to engage in a dialogic exercise by recalling what

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happened during a particular time in similar circumstances to other protagonists in other novels by Erdrich, or how different protagonists perceived similar situations and how they narrated those situations. Not only do the events in Erdrich’s novels defy linear temporal order, the work, although series-like, is also not published in accordance with any recognizable order or logic. Whereas we are acquainted with Father Damien in Love Medicine, Erdrich’s very first novel to be published (in 1984), we do not learn the protagonist’s story until 2001, when Erdrich published The Last Report. We learn of its creative origins when Erdrich says she started writing The Last Report in 1988, originally intending it to explain how all the earlier novels came into being. She imagined the local priest in Argus, Father Damien, who had appeared as a minor character in Love Medicine . . . It wasn't until six years and several books later that Erdrich picked up The Last Report again. The completed version chronicles the life of Father Damien. Erdrich started the book with two images: a woman in a white nightgown floating down a river on the top of a piano, and a priest taking his clothes off for bed and revealing that he is actually a woman. Turns out they became the same person. (Olson)

The novel grew out of a dialogue with other novels, it evolved, and then Erdrich resumed writing it. Her novels are mosaic-like, they destabilize narrative authority by including multiple and alternating narrators: first-, second-, third-person singular, and even second-person plural. The narrators complement each other’s stories, sometimes contradicting one another. Because there is much gossip, storytelling and subjective narration, their reliability is debatable. The Last Report commences with a “Prologue,” a third-person narrative delineating the Old Priest’s (Father Damien’s) last undertakings and the penning of the last report. It divulges a well-kept secret, namely the fact that Father Damien is a woman. This is a foreshadowing of a less traditional kind, or in the words of Mieke Bal: “the summary at the beginning. The rest of the story gives the explanation of the outcome presented at the beginning” (Bal 93). This revelation at the very outset of the novel prepares the reader to anticipate, follow and appreciate the process. Once the outcome is known, the subsequent stages of the story are underscored. The structure of The Last Report is inter—generic. It evokes a kaleidoscope of embedded genres, it includes reports, letters and stories within stories. The novel inter—weaves elements of history with fiction, mentioning historical details and employing poetic prose. The language of the novel is internally stratified, reflecting the linguistic heterogeneity

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which, in turn, corresponds with the variety of characters in the novel. They belong to different national and ethnic groups, they are U.S. Americans of Polish, German, French origin, as well as Germans, American Indians and mixed-bloods. The polyglossia of languages in Erdrich’s novel (American English, Ojibwe, German, French), paired with the heteroglossia of sociolects, result from encounters and dialogues between individuals from various cultures, of different sexes, genders, ages, social classes, professions and nationalities, thus making the novel inter—lingual and intra—lingual. Bakhtin terms this phenomenon the interanimation of languages and cultures, a reciprocal animation, a dialogic relationship, a polyglot consciousness characteristic of the novel (65). According to Bakhtin, the novel is unique not only because it eludes definitions and employs polyglossia and heteroglossia, but also because as it evolves, it adapts and parodies other genres and styles (5). Erdrich’s work is inter—textual with regard to Native American and non-Native American texts, its allusions sometimes subtle, sometimes overt. What is more unusual is the fact that it is also intra—textual. Faulkner practiced a similar dialogism, yet Erdrich’s version is more extensive. Her work enacts dialogues between other literary texts and between her own texts, earlier and later ones. The same characters become protagonists in different books. The same events are narrated or mentioned again, yet from different perspectives in different books by Erdrich, and this practice can lend “depth, volume, and complexity, while contesting simplistic explanations of the event” (Altman 289). It also reflects how different persons can view differently the same occurrence and thus help us flesh out their identities better. The Bingo Palace alludes to Ida, a protagonist from Michael Dorris’ A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (Stookey 8), and it is difficult to pinpoint exactly whether this is an intra—textual or inter— textual gesture, as Erdrich and Dorris co—operated very closely on several of their books. Her fiction and its intra-textual nature, compost pile-like, is incremental, augmented, where stories build on stories, characters return, incidents are re—told, where protagonists, settings, incidents are re—cycled. Fleur Pillager’s tales are a case in point. She reverberates throughout the novel sometimes as a passionate young girl, sometimes an elderly medicine woman or a wife to a white man. By reading the entire oeuvre we might be able to piece parts of her story together, even the story of her ancestors. Because her story never gets told completely, there are still blank spaces to be filled. The novelistic project remains a work-in-progress.

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Sometimes Erdrich’s novels “collect” material, accrue over time. As she told two interviewers, “I think a title is like a magnet: it begins to draw these scraps of experience or conversation or memory to it. Eventually, it collects a book” (Schumacher 176) and “Bits of narrative always cling to a title, like magnetism. I love titles. I have lists of titles that I haven’t gotten to. Tales of Burning Love and Shadow Tag were there for the longest time” (Halliday 2010). Erdrich creates a web of inter—related fragments, a dialogic intra—textual microcosm replete with characters, places and events the reader familiarizes him/herself with while reading subsequent novels, and spider web-like draws us into it – it is not that we cannot leave, we do not want to leave we become so involved, so invested. The author has not assigned an order in which the books should be read. It remains dependent on the reader’s own initiative, whim or coincidence. Her literary universe has an unfinished and dialogic quality, the reader has not learned every story yet, and Erdrich continues her prolific writing, filling in the gaps and poking holes in our preconceptions and expectations. There is no security that the story Erdrich is telling and weaving is complete, and the possibility of further installments is implied. Her work is reminiscent of a roman-fleuve, or a saga novel, a long novel, often in volumes, chronicling the history of several generations of a family, or a community, and often portraying an overall view of society during a particular period, in Erdrich’s case the twentieth century primarily. Recalcitrant towards notions of finality and completion, Erdrich suffuses her writing with an incessant quality of changing and becoming. What more auspicious space to do it in than the novel, since “in a novel the individual acquires the ideological and linguistic initiative necessary to change the nature of his own image” (Bakhtin 38). The protagonist of the novel is not obligated to exhibit or represent heroic qualities, is not trapped in a literary still life for future generations to revere. In the novel: “There is no mere form that would be able to incarnate once and forever all of his human possibilities and needs, no form in which he could exhaust himself down to the last word, like the tragic or epic hero . . . There always remains an unrealized surplus of humanness” (Bakhtin 37-38). The protagonist’s complexity, source of “an unrealized surplus of humanness” embodies potential space for experimentation. More ambiguity and more dialogism can occur in the “compost pile” of the novel, the most pliant of all genres with its unexhausted surplus. The following analysis highlights the nexus and the dialogue between the formal category of the novel and thematic coordinates of religion and gender. I intend to corroborate the thesis that, in correspondence with the novel’s complex gestation, vitality and perennial incompleteness as

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asseverated by Bakhtin, Erdrich capitalizes on the novel’s dialogism, i.e. its open-endedness, inclusiveness, and heterogeneity; and renders dynamic and dialogic social categories which are allegedly rigid and stable, such as gender and religion. While probing the “unrealized surplus of humanness” as epitomized by the persona of Sister Cecilia/Agnes DeWitt/Father Damien, I will trace this protagonist’s constantly becoming identity which exemplifies a struggle for integrity accompanied by trans—formations and identity shifts.

Narrative, Gender, Religion, and the Concept of Trans—Formation Being a “genre-in-the-making” (Bakhtin 11), the novel seems perfectly aligned with the shifts and ruptures in gender, religious and spiritual identities as delineated in The Last Report. Religion is a distinctly gendered concept in Catholicism, so gender and religion are already in dialogue, but Erdrich foregrounds them and I will trace the inter—sections between the two concepts. Taking the cue from Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, I employ the concept of “intersectionality” to portray how the categories of gender and religion inter—act in the functioning of the protagonist of The Last Report. I posit that by looking separately at gender or the religious dimensions of her/his identity the picture remains incomplete. In other words, her/his gender identity could be obscured by discussing solely her/his religious identity, for her/his identity is constructed through inter—sections of multiple facets. This is a practice inviting dialogue, or as Crenshaw states: Recognizing that identity politics takes place at the site where categories intersect thus seems more fruitful than challenging the possibility of talking about categories at all. Through an awareness of intersectionality, we can better acknowledge and ground the differences among us and negotiate the means by which these differences will find expression in constructing group politics. (Crenshaw 377)

Applying inter—sectionality (the dash is my intervention in order to underscore the dialogic potential) when analyzing the protagonist’s identity promises insights into her/his complexity rather than a onedimensional portrait of a person. In view of this, the protagonist’s identity could be positioned at three inter—sections at least: religion, gender, and ethnicity (in her analysis Crenshaw focuses on gender and race). Just as the meanings and stories are dynamic, so too the protagonists in Erdrich’s novels resist static depictions, and categories such as gender and religion

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are never final, nor absolute. In the novel the categories of religion and gender could be bridged by the concept of metamorphosis and its synonyms. Whether one speaks of metamorphosis, transfiguration, conversion, modification, transmutation, transmogrification, or translation, the common denominator is always a process of trans—forming from one state to another. In The Last Report the reader is confronted with transitions and trans—formations pertaining to the narrative structure and gender and religious identity as exemplified by the metamorphosis of Sister Cecilia into Agnes DeWitt, then into Father Damien. Who would have thought, while reading Love Medicine (1984, 1993, 2009) or Tracks (1988), that the secondary character of Father Damien used to be Sister Cecilia and Agnes DeWitt? The trans—formations-cumrevelations brought about with the publication of The Last Report are many and unexpected. This is true even though “we have gotten used to Erdrich’s continuous rewriting of previous stories in her interlocking narratives, where meanings are dynamic and stories have a living quality” (Martínez Falquina 219), as well as to the fact that after the tetralogy her protagonists continue to “live” as she resumes writing new tales. Religion/spirituality as a theme reverberates in every novel penned by Louise Erdrich. I will write these two terms with a virgule, or what I call a “tilted hyphen,” to signal two things: an attempt to connect two words and a continuum and not an opposition, since Catholicism and Ojibwe beliefs are usually perceived as polar opposites. Catholic upbringing and exposure to her grandfather’s syncretistic practice—a combination of traditional Ojibwe spirituality and Catholicism—possibly have affected the choices she makes when it comes to the religiosity/spirituality of her protagonists. Expressing her views on the matter in her early publications, Erdrich said in 1987: I don’t deal much with religion except Catholicism. Although Ojibway traditional religion is flourishing, I don’t feel comfortable discussing it. I guess I have my beefs about Catholicism. Although you never change once you’re raised a Catholic—you’ve got that. You’ve got that symbolism, that guilt, you’ve got the whole works and you can’t really change that. That’s easy to talk about because you have to exorcise it somehow. That’s why there’s a lot of Catholicism in both books [Love Medicine and the poetry volume Jacklight]. (Bruchac 100)

When saying “I don’t feel comfortable discussing it,” Erdrich might have possessed a second-hand knowledge of Ojibwe spirituality, or might have been reluctant to discuss its sacred practice, in order not to divulge it to the outsiders who could misapply it. In subsequent books she experiments

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with Ojibwe spirituality in addition to employing Catholic tradition. In a 2010 interview she says of her beliefs: I’ve come to love the traditional Ojibwe ceremonies, and some rituals, but I hate religious rules. They are usually about controlling women. On Sundays when other people go to wood-and-stone churches, I like to take my daughters into the woods. Or at least work in the garden and be outside. Any god we have is out there. I’d hate to be certain that there was nothing. When it comes to God, I cherish doubt. (Halliday 2010)

Erdrich mentions the word “change,” and the notion of change connects religion/spirituality with gender in her writing in general, and in The Last Report in particular. Religion is gendered and Erdrich emphasizes this fact. She imagines multifarious trans—formations a single individual can undergo: a former nun swaps a celibate life for an existence dedicated to the quotidian pleasures of living with a farmer, she then anoints herself a priest, becomes a man, and in addition to Christian worldviews, honors and adopts Ojibwe beliefs. The subsequent paragraphs will attest to the fact that the trans—formations of this one protagonist are never seamless, never entirely final and the identities are often simultaneous and continuous, their fissures reflected by the narrative.

Trans—formation #1: Religion and Gender—Sister Cecilia to Agnes DeWitt—The Come-Between In order to portray the three trans—formations of Sister Cecilia/Agnes/ Father Damien across religions/spiritualities and genders, I employ terms such as: the come-between, the in-between, and the go-between, which stress the dialogue between the identities s/he carves for her/himself. The word “between” is not meant to signal a dichotomous system of any kind, however. S/he enters new dialogues with every shift in her/his identity. “To come between” means to cause conflict, estrangement or separation, and the first trans—formation s/he experiences resonates with these emotions and states. We meet Sister Cecilia and we learn that her passionate piano playing motivates fellow nuns to uncontrolled displays of emotions. Not being able, or willing, to contain that passion, she abandons the convent and the vows: “just as in the depth of her playing the virgin had become the woman, so the woman in the habit became a woman to the bone” (LR 16). Sister Cecilia replaces Jesus with Chopin and Berndt Vogel, a man of flesh and blood who teaches Sister Cecilia, turned Agnes DeWitt, to explore and enjoy the joys of carnal love. From a pious and

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innocent nun, she trans—forms into a woman aware of and satisfied with her sexuality. By welcoming the unfamiliar interference of her sensuality and sexuality, hence I call this stage the come-between, Agnes is fulfilled, complete as a human being. The part of the book foretelling and describing these changes is titled “The Transfiguration of Agnes.” According to the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, “transfiguration” can have a three-fold meaning. First, it denotes “a change in form or appearance: metamorphosis;” second, it is “an exalting, glorifying, or spiritual change;” third, it refers directly to the Christian tradition and is used to describe “the transfiguration of Christ on a mountaintop in the presence of three disciples” (1249). Whereas the first meaning is obvious, the second meaning could apply to the next trans—formation in her life (Agnes into Father Damien). The third meaning is problematic, for by implying that Agnes, like Jesus, is trans— figured, Erdrich unleashes a plethora of questions. Can one compare Jesus Christ to a woman? And to a woman who does not live a celibate life and is not religious in the conventional understanding of the term? Despite the potential blasphemy, what is it that these two have in common, as Erdrich seems to suggest? Love and devotion, traits which cross the boundaries and invite dialogue between genders and religions/spiritualities, as I will try to demonstrate. After Berndt’s tragic death and the flood in which Agnes almost drowns, she comes to in a cabin and is taken care of by a kind man she thinks is a personification of God: Having met Him just that once, having known Him in a man’s body, how could I not love Him until death. How could I not follow Him? Be thou like as me, were His words, and I took them literally to mean that I should attend him as a loving woman follows her soldier into the battle of life, dressed as He is dressed, suffering the same hardships. (LR 43-44)

Various transfigurations are at work in this passage: Berndt, whom she misses, implicitly becomes Jesus Christ. Since Agnes has known a man intimately, this “God” is perceived through that lens as well, and the encounter is sensual and spiritual at the same time. This passage implies a marriage of body and soul even if she purports to answer a religious calling and to abandon the carnal aspect of her identity. The encounter entails the choice of a path of all-encompassing love Jesus Christ endorsed and embodied, but it is also problematic with regard to the “soldier” metaphor, implying a potentially two-fold violence of the mission: becoming a priest and a man. Agnes makes it her creed on the eve of her

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ensuing trans—formation, and in a new disguise and a new role continues where Sister Cecilia left off.

Trans—formation #2: Gender and Religion— Agnes DeWitt to Father Damien—The In-Between After the flood, Agnes finds Father Damien Modeste the first dead and drowned. Adopting his cassock and the mission, “the impostor” heads towards the reservation to start a new life, “the great lie that was her life— the true lie, she considered it, the most sincere lie a person could ever tell” (LR 61). Bal points out that frequent trans—formations of the characters, or the narrator and the focalizer, are connected with seeing differently, with gaining new insights, a changed vision: “seeing difference turns the fabula around, makes the character different” (Bal 19). Her/his changed visions are related to a change of position, both in terms of visible gender and authority: at the outset of her/his life as a priest, s/he1 notices subtle differences in the way people treat her/him “with much more respect as a priest than she’d ever known as a nun . . . So this is what a priest gets, heads bowing and curious respectful attention!” (LR 62). Religion is gendered, hierarchical and s/he learns this as a result of her/his new perspective as a Catholic priest, a person with clout. While being escorted to the reservation by an Ojibwe man named Kashpaw, s/he finds herself inquiring avidly: “As Agnes, she’d always felt too inhibited to closely question men. Questions from women to men always raised questions of a different nature. As a man, she found that Father Damien was free to pursue all questions with frankness and ease” (LR 62). Erdrich subtly unravels male privilege when it comes to Catholic religion and church hierarchies. The passing endows her/him with courage and a different mindset, s/he is becoming a different person but never fully becomes just one person with a monolithic identity. This identity is reminiscent of a trans—gender identity which does not fall into any gender categories, as it eludes the binary gender specification and is an unstable position, devoid of linear transition. The protagonist has an affair with Father Gregory, but rather as Agnes, in private, than as the public persona of Father Damien. How can one even represent the protagonist in terms of

 1

After Agnes adopts the disguise and identity of Father Damien, I will refer to the protagonist as s/he (Sister Cecilia/Agnes/Father Damien), as it is never quite clear where one identity ends and the other one begins, even if Erdrich employs different pronouns. The tilted hyphen stands for the instability, the rocking and inchoateness s/he embodies.

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the name and the pronouns used—two designations most basic for describing an individual? S/he is not anchored, oscillates and eludes the binary gender system. Those are interesting, destabilizing moments. I posit that the in-betweenness, she experiences and embodies, does not suggest a movement between a dichotomous gender specification, but signals a continuity, of genders inter—acting without ever fully merging in her/his case. Again, how can this inchoate trans—formation be described, that of a woman into a man? A full-fledged shift, or simply a dialogue? The transition is not seamless. Martínez Falquina posits that s/he moves “between fragmentation of character and unity of purpose and vocation, between contradiction and coherence” (219). One observes the inconsistencies and interstices on the narrative level when in one sentence it is Agnes who speaks, reacts or feels, and Father Damien in the next: “The Mass came to Agnes like memorized music. She had only to say the first words and all followed, ordered, instinctive . . . In the silences between the parts of the ritual, Father Damien prayed” (LR 68). The metamorphosis is never complete: “There would be times that she missed the ease of moving in her old skin, times that Father Damien was pierced by womanness and suffered. Still, Agnes was certain now that she had done the right thing” (LR 65). A dialogue, but perhaps also a performance? Judith Butler probed the nexus between performance and gender identity arguing the latter to be an enactment, a performance on a daily basis. In the article “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” Butler asserts that gender is not “a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time” (900). Gender is the effect of “a stylized repetition of acts,” “a performative accomplishment,” which encompasses “bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds” (Butler 900). The protagonist of The Last Report becomes aware of the performance: “It came to her that both Sister Cecilia and then Agnes were as heavily manufactured of gesture and pose as was Father Damien” (LR 76). To facilitate the metamorphosis and to make the disguise appear credible, s/he devises “Some Rules to Assist in My Transformation,” ten commandmentlike performative acts, vocal and corporeal, s/he intends to practice in order to appear more masculine to her flock: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Make requests in the form of orders. Give compliments in the form of concessions. Ask questions in the form of statements. Exercises to enhance the muscles of the neck?

Compost Pile and Temporary Storage 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

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Admire women’s handiwork with copious amazement. Stride, swing arms, stop abruptly, stroke chin. Sharpen razor daily. Advance no explanations. Accept no explanations. Hum an occasional resolute march. (my emphasis; LR 74)

The list encompasses the kind of comportment, mainly referring to speech acts, movements and appearances, one might expect of a man in a position of authority in the Western tradition, a priest for example. What is striking is that the speech acts (in bold) s/he intends to emulate seem fundamentally non-dialogic, unilateral, as if being a man or acting like a man excluded any form of dialogic communication. Why? Where does her/his need to assume radically non-dialogic behavior in order to become Father Damien stem from? Theoretically, masculinity does not need to perform, it either is or it is not. White, straight and male identity is erroneously considered neutral and transparent, devoid of enactments. S/he interprets, dramatizes, then re—produces male gender identity. It becomes her/his project, a strategy to pass and to survive, s/he needs to repeatedly perform in order to sustain her/his long-term plan to serve God and people in disguise, for, as Butler suggests “the body becomes its gender through a series of acts which are renewed, revised, and consolidated through time” (903-904). Her/his gender identity is based on repetition, re—enactment and re—experiencing. In a parodic gesture, s/he also intends to obtain “Dr. Feem’s Scientific Programme of Muscular Expansion,” which consists of “dumbbells, a book of directions, and one muscle tonic that promised to improve the tone of the entire upper body and another bottle that worked on the half below” (LR 74). Gender is a day-to-day performance, it “is what is put on, invariably, under constraint, daily and incessantly, with anxiety and pleasure,” Butler asserts (910). This trans—formation s/he oftentimes perceives “as the loss of Agnes” (LR 76). S/he ceases to be Agnes with the daylight and when leaving the cabin, as “her thoughts became Damien’s thoughts,” the voice grew bolder, the stride altered, “between these two, where was the real self?” (LR 76). This resembles a very traditional split into the domestic female and public male performances, yet it also is subversive, a double passing (that of a woman as a man, and that of a layperson as a priest), which, if discovered, could inflict on her/him punitive consequences. The self, real yet provisional, is situated somewhere in-between: Father Damien was both a robber and a priest. For what is it to entertain a daily deception? . . . She felt no guilt, and so concluded that if God sent none she

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Chapter I would not invent any. She decided to miss Agnes as she would a beloved sister, to make of Father Damien her creation. He would be loving, protective, remote, and immensely disciplined. He would be Agnes’s twin, her masterwork, her brother. (LR 77)

Agnes creates Father Damien and becomes an actor, an artist working on a masterpiece. She acts, despite the stereotype of a supposedly passive female. Erdrich twists the rules and dialogues with the stereotype. Interestingly, s/he conceives of Father Damien as “loving, protective, remote, and immensely disciplined,” thus combining dialogic and nondialogic characteristics. Impatient with the useless flow of monthly blood, s/he prays for cessation and the wish is granted. However, “No sooner had the evidence vanished than she felt a pang, a loss, an eerie rocking between genders” (LR 78). Other characters intuit the “rocking,” the in-betweenness – for example, the Ojibwe elders Kashpaw and Nanapush sense the gender ambivalence of the priest. Once Nanapush asks Father Damien: “What are you?” . . . “A priest.” . . . “A man priest or a woman priest?” . . . .Why . . . are you pretending to be a man priest? . . . Are you a female Wishkob?” (LR 230-231)

Nanapush non-judgmentally recognizes the “disguise” simply because a similar form (yet not synonymous!) of gender ambiguity is recognized in Ojibwe tradition. The term berdache or “two-spirit” refers to “native gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered persons” and to “deities, demigods, or even human beings” (Elledge xiii-xiv), but it is useful to note that each tribe assigns a different name to individuals who are “two-spirits” (Elledge xvi). Adopting the clothing, habits, and performances of another gender, berdaches prove that “For many native Americans sexuality seems to have been more fluid than the polarized notion of heterosexuality at one extreme and homosexuality at the opposite extreme allows” (Elledge xv). They were considered a third gender. Two-spirit individuals were entrusted with particular societal roles and believed to possess exceptional abilities: “the status of two-spirit men and women seems to have often been honored among the communities, including the role of medicine men and women” (Elledge xviii). Martínez Falquina affirms that the protagonist is a trickster berdache due to the “positioning in the space between body and mind, flesh and language” (220). S/he is a sexual being, revels in life’s pleasures, be they while playing Chopin on the piano, while being with Berndt or, disguised

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as a priest, having a romantic relationship with Father Gregory. Martínez Falquina argues that as “a trickster berdache, and therefore a master of the possibilities of ambiguity and transformation” (220), s/he achieves unity “in spite of fragmentation—or perhaps thanks to fragmentation” (220). Patrice Hollrah argues, however, that because the term “berdache” refers to Native Americans exclusively, it cannot be applied to the protagonist of The Last Report for it constitutes an example of “the misappropriation of Native knowledge and identity” (99). S/he is white after all. Also, because the protagonist “makes the decision to pass as a priest before he arrives at Little No Horse, as a person socialized in Catholicism and Western constructs of gender based on a binary system of man and woman” (108). I agree with Hollrah that the two experiences cannot be conflated, s/he is neither a trickster, nor a berdache, though at first sight s/he resembles one. Her/his transvestism is a form of passing, which refers to “anatomical females donning masculine appearance for the purpose of being perceived as men” (Boyd 422). It is a passing motivated by circumstances, a successful essay to bypass the restrictions of the Catholic Church which only allows men to become priests. Judith Jack Halberstam claims there are more than just two gender paradigms, and discusses the multiplicity of female masculinities, but links these with lesbian and trans—sexual aspects of identity. These aspects are absent in the case of the protagonist, for s/he is not inter—sexual, s/he is a straight heterosexual who falls for another man and is a woman passing for a priest. In the “End Notes” Erdrich invokes the life of Billie Tipton, as described in Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton (LR 357). Tipton was a woman disguised as a man, and in relationships with women. But Tipton passed for a man, because the profession of a jazz musician was not available to women in her time. None of these is true for Sister Cecilia/Agnes/Father Damien. S/he alters some of the things that will facilitate her/his passing, s/he impersonates a man with the help of some accouterments seen traditionally as masculine, but the novel does not suggest s/he is homo- or trans— sexual, or that s/he desires to be. S/he creates a particular expression of gender for her own purposes, neither female masculinity, nor masculine femininity, her own idiosyncratic version which defies the logic of a binary gender system and does not even fit with the scenarios described by Halberstam. According to Hollrah, “Erdrich places no labels or rigid paradigms on her characters’ gender identities and sexual orientations but demonstrates how they care deeply for other people” (105), and this characteristic constitutes the basis for dialogue. The constant flux and movement verging on the “fragmentation of character and unity of purpose and vocation, between contradiction and

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coherence” (Martínez Falquina 220) is reflected in, at times, confusing shifts between the two names and pronouns when it is not only Father Damien asking for enlightenment, but also Agnes praying for answers, or when the readers expect Father Damien to refer to religious matters, but instead they hear Agnes’ thoughts. S/he mediates between genders, engaging in an inter—gender and inter—faith dialogue, between religions and spiritualities. During prayer these different identities of the protagonist merge and voice wishes, doubts and longings in an unusual, but not cacophonous manner: Four times a day—on rising, at noon, late afternoon, and before going to bed—Agnes and Father Damien became that one person who addressed the unknown. The priest stopped what he was doing, cast himself down, made himself transparent, broke himself open. That is prayed . . . He prayed, uneasily, for the conversion of Nanapush, then prayed for his own enlightenment in case converting Nanapush was a mistake. Agnes asked for a cheerful spirit and that her dangerous longings cease. She asked for answers . . . .She began to address the trinity as four and to include the spirit of each direction—those who sat at the four corners of the earth. Wherever she prayed, she made of herself a temporary center of those directions. There, she allowed herself to fall apart. Disintegrated into pieces of creation, which God might pick up and turn curiously this way and that to catch the light . . . .Whether God picked up the fragments and stuck them back together, or casually swept them aside was of no consequence either to Agnes or Father Damien. (LR 182)

The stylistic, the narrative, and the linguistic aspects of this syncretic passage aptly epitomize her/his mosaic-like disintegration, i.e. the unfinished identity of the individual wary of absolute truths and impermeable dogmas. The passage is rich in tensions between genders, between Catholic and Ojibwe conceptions of the divine and the human, and between the geographies of the colonizers and the colonized. Different personalities of the protagonist come together and come undone during an unorthodox praying ritual where gender differences, Catholic, and Ojibwe understandings of the numinous, converge into a dialogic, if turbulent co—existence. The prayer with its multiple orientations—four times a day, four spirits of each direction, four corners of the earth—undermines the Western binaries present in the discoursed of gender, religion, and colonialism. The omnipotence of God is questioned, or at least it is not prioritized, only the process, not the outcome, of praying, of breaking open, is of consequence. Here, the dialogue is problematic and violent, but the fact that it is nevertheless undertaken is laudable.

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Sister Cecilia, Agnes and Father Damien form an alternative, a feminine/masculine, Trinity which could mirror the tripartite nature of the dialogue. This corresponds to what Michael Holquist, a Bakhtinian scholar and translator, has described as the “thirdness of dialogue” Dialogue is not, as is sometimes thought, a dyadic, much less a binary phenomenon. Dialogue is a manifold phenomenon, but for schematic purposes it can be reduced to minimum of three elements having a structure very much like the triadic construction of the linguistic sign: a dialogue is composed of an utterance, a reply, and a relation between the two. It is the relation that is most important of the three, for without it the other two would have no meaning. (Holquist 38)

The third element, the relation, reaches beyond the reputed dichotomist configuration of the dialogue, potentially dismantling the logic of polarity. “The thirdness of dialogue” could dismantle the dialogue’s erroneous prefix “di—” denoting a “twoness.” “The thirdness of dialogue” makes dialogue possible, for a connection between the communicating agents is prioritized and the space for dialogue is created. Utterance and reply constitute a continuity, take place in a shared context and do not belong to opposite camps. The heterogeneous nature of dialogue, which in this light should perhaps be re—christened “poly-,” “multi-,” or “heterologue,” could be interpreted as an antidote to the antidialogic colonialist practices enacted by Catholic missionaries on Indian reservations in the past.

Trans—formation #3: Religion to Spirituality; and a Matter of Ethnicity—Father Damien “Converted”—The Go-Between The following trans—formation is triggered by a love affair with Father Gregory Wekkle, who is sent to Damien’s parish for an apprenticeship. The passionate and nurturing relationship does not last long. S/he will not abandon her/his mission yet again in order to lead a secular existence, and Father Gregory cannot accept the deception in the long run. The profound personal crisis calls for a syncretistic search for solace and s/he assents to Nanapush’ sweat lodge. With this gesture, s/he welds a dialogue between two epistemologies: religion and spirituality. The healing can commence once s/he realizes the feasible and sustainable permeability, complementarity, and dialogue of beliefs and states, and s/he concludes: “The ordinary as well as esoteric forms of worship engaged in by the Ojibwe are sound, even compatible with the teachings of Christ” (LR 49). S/he has a sense of belonging when speaking about people s/he inter—acts with, yet there is a

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feeling of separateness from “their own philosophy,” a semantic slippage where her/his ethnicity of a white wo/man intervenes. The situation is dialogic, but not entirely risk-free, for even if the will to communicate, and to communicate successfully, is present, the wider context of the encounter is problematic, from a historical as well as individual point of view. This does not however translate into a warning that such dialogic efforts should be discontinued. In order to be able to communicate with her/his flock, s/he makes an effort and learns their language and translates Catholic texts into Ojibwe. S/he also translates their texts into English in an attempt to facilitate a dialogue between two religious and spiritual traditions, acting as a gobetween, an interpreter. Her/his own position is not entirely on a par with his/her people; the rapport, although friendly from her/his point of view, might not be seen as such by the Ojibwe. In the course of living and working on Little No Horse reservation, s/he feels at home among the Ojibwes and employs unorthodox methods, for More than any other blessed sacrament, Father Damien enjoyed hearing sins, chewing over people’s stories, and then with a flourish absolving and erasing their wrongs, sending sinners out of the church clean and new. He forgave with exacting kindness, but completely, and prided himself in dispensing unusual penances that fit the sin. People appreciated his interest in their weaknesses as well as his sense of compassionate justice. (LR 5)

This passage shows “surplus of humanness” at its best: “compassionate justice” combined with interest, wisdom and kindness. Apprehensive of converting her/his flock to Catholicism, s/he trans—forms, learns the language of “my people,” and adopts Ojibwe beliefs insofar as they embody the values s/he also cherishes. Hers/his is not a peremptory proselytizing, for s/he acknowledges and allows flaws and frailties without immediately condemning the people in her/his charge and regaling them with scathing diatribes in a confessional. The protagonist merges discourses, seeks common denominators without subscribing to just one particular and exclusionary religious or ideological belief or monologue.

The Potential of Dialogism Erdrich’s The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse epitomizes the “stylistic three-dimensionality . . . linked with the multi-languaged consciousness” that Bakhtin postulated as inherent to the novel (11). These traits, heteroglossia and polyglossia in Erdrich’s novel, where sociolects

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and languages inter—act and inter—mingle, culminate in a unique consciousness. In the words of Bakhtin: The world becomes polyglot, once and for all and irreversibly. The period of national languages, coexisting but closed and deaf to each other, comes to an end. Languages throw light on each other: one language can, after all, see itself only in the light of another language. (12)

Bakhtinian logic presupposes that the novel is a dialogic phenomenon, an orchestration composed of a “diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized” (262-263). Furthermore, the national language in the novel is internally stratified reflecting the linguistic heterogeneity. Bakhtin posits that dialogization and “internal stratification” (263) are sine qua non for the novel as The novel orchestrates all its themes, the totality of the world of objects and ideas depicted and expressed in it, by means of the social diversity of speech types . . . and by the differing individual voices that flourish under such conditions. Authorial speech, the speeches of narrators, inserted genres, the speech of characters are merely those fundamental compositional unities with whose help heteroglossia . . . can enter the novel; each of them permits a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and interrelationships between utterances and languages, this movement of the theme through different languages and speech types, its dispersion into the rivulets and droplets of social heteroglossia, its dialogization—this is the basic distinguishing feature of the stylistics of the novel. (263)

The stratifying centrifugal tendencies of heteroglossia (“internal differentiation, the stratification characteristic of any national language” 67) color the novel, its style and form, mostly in the shape of dialogues between Father Damien and Nanapush whose epistemologies often converge and also often depart from one another. The external stratification and diversity of languages, polyglossia, results from an inter—animation of languages: American English, Ojibwe, and German. Thus, Ojibwes sometimes speak Ojibwe, as does Father Damien, and Berndt Vogel, Agnes’ lover, speaks German. Father Damien also employs Latin in his church rituals. And thus as speakers of these languages inter—act, they look for different linguistic planes to communicate, inter—mingling languages, teaching and misunderstanding each other, but at least attempting a dialogue.

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Erdrich’s novels are intra—lingual (heteroglossia within one language) and inter—lingual (polyglossia of languages). The author builds a web of connections of related stories, characters, places, events, and the loyal and alert reader receives a dialogic opportunity to participate in the history of families by piecing their stories together. Stirrup depicts her literary work as a web, or a fabric, with multiple threads interwoven, narrative strands tied together, spliced, unraveling or fraying, its knots coming undone (69, 135, 153). The author inter—weaves into her novels tales narrated by traditional Ojibwe characters, most often the elder Nanapush who thrives on telling stories of origins, always edifying, sometimes meant to induce laughter. To complement this, Father Damien employs a whole spectrum of genres: “fierce political attacks, reproachful ecclesiastical letters, memoirs of reservation life for history journals, and poetry” (LR 2). S/he also writes a short story entitled “History of the Puyats,” an account of Sister Leopolda’s ancestors. The third-person omniscient narration dominates the novel, along with multiple-focus narration following different protagonists, sprinkled with Father Damien’s reports and Nanapush’s tales in the firstperson. Another protagonist, Lulu Nanapush also receives a chance to narrate her story again: the story of her abandonment and her ordeals in the government school. Erdrich’s novels make frequent use of frame narratives “in which at the second or third level a complete story is told” (Bal 57). Father Damien, the reservation chronicler, pens reports about the life at Little No Horse and sends them to every Pope from 1912 through 1996. Interestingly enough, the letters to the Popes remain unanswered. While composing the last letter to Pope John Paul II s/he reflects: apparently, one couldn’t hope for a reply, oh no, that would be all too human, wouldn’t it? An actual response from the Pope after a lifetime of devoted correspondence. Or could he call it that, implying as the word did some reciprocity, at least the semblance of an exchange . . . .His was a onesided conversation, then, a monologue, a faithful and dogged adherence to truth. (LR 3)

The good deeds the protagonist has performed among the Ojibwe people are officially recognized when, alleviating the earlier refusal of dialogue, a long awaited response, a fax from the Vatican arrives—alas, shortly after Father Damien’s death: “Father Damien, your love for the people in your care is a joyful statement of your faith. May you abide happily in their return of your affection, and pass your days now in pleasant contemplation of all the good you have accomplished” (LR 355). The message literally

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falls on dead ears, and yet it epitomizes the hope for a dialogue, no matter how belated. The contents of the response do not disclose anything Father Damien did not know when s/he was alive. The outcome under the guise of an acknowledgment from a higher authority, Catholic and all male, is of limited consequence, what mattered was the process, Father Damien’s life, her/his deeds and their results. The protagonist’s is not a Western understanding of Catholicism, but an eclectic stance combining Catholicism and Native beliefs, and converging into a stance of humanness and empathy. The stance perhaps constitutes an attempt to achieve parity regarding religion/spirituality and gender through dialogism. Dialogism’s penchant for destabilizing hierarchies is attained by introducing a third quality in the guise of a protagonist verging on impossibility, straddling different categories and forging a respectful link between the two: a Catholic priest who is a woman and who subscribes to Ojibwe beliefs. The simultaneity of these identities attests to the fact that horizontality can replace verticality, thus upsetting the alleged naturalness of hierarchies and binarisms. Purity is superseded by hybridity, black and white by gray. The non-binary thinking is aptly illustrated during a conversation between Father Damien and a fellow priest, who comes to the reservation to investigate the claims of Sister Leopolda’s sainthood. Jude Miller says: “It is just that certain norms of behavior are taken for granted. Right. Wrong. These are simply distinguished. Black is black and white is white.” “The mixture is gray.” “There are no gray areas in my philosophy,” said Father Jude. “I have never seen the truth,” said Damien, “without crossing my eyes. Life is crazy.” “Our job is to make it less so.” “Our job is to understand it.” (LR 134-135)

Black and white are very definite colors, whereas gray areas lend themselves to a dialogic interpretation, signaling reciprocity and co— existence, even if they also stand for confusion, ambivalence, a process nevertheless. Erdrich’s novels portray maverick protagonists, shunning ideologies which would impinge on their individual understanding of the religious and the spiritual. The concepts of gender and sexuality in Erdrich’s novels resist labeling and clear-cut boundaries. This writing is also political insofar as it asserts that “women can live autonomous lives and succeed in whatever kind of work they choose. Erdrich creates no limitations that women cannot overcome . . . allowing them to engage in an endless number of possibilities, including changing gender identities

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and sexual orientations” (Hollrah 115). The novel according to Erdrich, this multi-voiced and malleable phenomenon, can accommodate dialogisms which empower the protagonists, be they concerned with their gender, religious/spiritual or ethnic identities.

The Viability of the Novel In The Dialogic Imagination Bakhtin locates the novel’s efficacy lodged in its proclivity towards liminality and inchoateness: “The generic skeleton of the novel is still far from having hardened, and we cannot foresee all its plastic possibilities” (3). Is the literary scholar to perceive this condition as a quandary or an opportunity? Or both, and he or she is left to hope that the tension and ambivalence will prove productive? Resenting labels, the novel, according to Bakhtin, “reflects more deeply, more essentially, more sensitively and rapidly, reality itself in the process of its unfolding. Only that which is itself developing can comprehend development as a process” (7). The novel refuses to fit neatly into generic constraints, “It is a genre that is ever questing, ever examining itself and subjecting its established forms to review” (Bakhtin 39), a genre embracing, transcending and reaching beyond, both formally and thematically. In the “Introduction” to The Dialogic Imagination, Holquist argues that Bakhtin resisted “strict formalization” (xvii), and that he sought to theorize instead of systematize. The novel “does not lack its organizing principles, but they are of a different order from those regulating sonnets or odes” (xviii). It exceeds the norm, is surplus, and accommodates excess. Bakhtin prioritizes language while theorizing the novel and, in the words of Holquist, deems the novel “a consciously structured hybrid of languages” (xxix), and a hybrid in general, as it “can include, ingest, devour other genres and still retain its status as a novel (“Introduction” xxxii). This statement is reminiscent of the “compost pile” and its tendency to welcome almost everything into its “structure.”

Conclusion The dialogic stance Erdrich employs refracts any definite and homogenous identity, as it problematizes multifarious hierarchies and dichotomies, be they sexual, spiritual or national, inviting the reader to question the putative finality and uniformity of the concept of the novel, and themes of religion/spirituality and gender. Narrative instability of The Last Report (plethora of genres) is paired with the fluidity of the protagonist’s identity and the fact that we are never sure who speaks: Sister Cecilia or Father

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Damien. The novel, and Erdrich’s novelistic microcosm of texts, are not final outcomes and it is a perfect medium to reflect the protagonist’s identity, a work-in-progress as well. Her novels are compost-pile like and accrue material over a course of time. They are also in temporary storage, never finalized, but always theoretically subject to re—visions, new artistic visions resulting in versions published anew. Her early novels were co—authored with Michael Dorris. This practice is another attempt to push the boundaries of the novel, to expand its dialogic potential.

CHAPTER II A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST(S): THE ERDRICH-DORRIS LITERARY PARTNERSHIP

I argue that dialogism and inter—connectedness are the organizing principles in Erdrich’s novels. They constitute her artistic vision of the novelistic genre and undergird her initial practice of writing in co— operation with her late husband (died in 1997). That partnership is not as issue-free as they portrayed it to be and as I initially thought it to be. This chapter problematizes the phenomenon of a literary marriage, and thus tests the limits of a dialogue in work and in life. Before there are novels, there is writing. Writing practices can be very idiosyncratic and differ greatly among writers. What works for one writer might not work for another. No single writing experience can represent the entire plethora of writing crafts. In Western cultures, writing is usually considered a solitary activity performed by an individual in seclusion, a solo act by definition, an exercise of an ego. Can composing a novel be dialogic? In dialogue with somebody else? Not just the previous writers’ work, but with another individual, another writer? Collaborating while writing sounds almost blasphemous, as the term “collaboration,” according to Robert Morace, is “not only a word burdened with negative connotations of betrayal, but one whose most literal meaning and deepest essence is so inimical to American individualism” (39). The tension can however become potentially fruitful in this context, for it proves that co—operation and individualism do not have to be viewed as dichotomies, but elements of a continuum, in dialogue, not in stark opposition. This chapter will first depict the ErdrichDorris literary partnership by quoting from interviews, by default oral and dialogical genres, which were often conducted with both, Erdrich and Dorris, and also separately. Then, I will complicate the argument by quoting from one, much later interview, in which Erdrich tells a different story about their work and life together.

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From Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, a collection of twenty-three interviews (given jointly and individually and spanning the years 1985-1993), we learn of “this husband-and-wife team” sharing everything they do (Chavkin and Feyl Chavkin, “Introduction” ix). These writers had attracted much attention and given “more than one hundred forty interviews in the United States,” mostly on the topic of their literary co—operation, their marriage, and the on-going dialogue between the two (Chavkin and Feyl Chavkin, “Introduction” ix). Oftentimes, interviews were conducted at their home and interrupted by episodes of domestic life, attesting to the fact that there was not a clean break between life and art for these two writers, and that writing constituted an integral part of the domestic landscape. They were co—operators in marriage and career, in a 24/7 arrangement. Whenever possible, children would accompany the writers, so that “readings and book tours become family events” (Brainard 137). Cooperman claims that Erdrich “uses her children and housework for grounding, ballast against the ethereal world of intellect and belles lettres, prizes and conferences and book tours” (Cooperman 66). Their unique co—operation was inherently dialogic and involved doing research, developing plot and characters, discussing the work and its elements, agreeing on every word before submitting texts for publication (Chavkin and Feyl Chavkin, “Introduction” x). At the same time, the writing periods of the person who was doing the primary writing were entirely solitary. Often they haggled and traded. Erdrich would say: “I will get rid of this line, if you will get rid of that line” (Wong, “An Interview” 36). Since they both come from large families and they too were raising many children “given the accommodations that big families make to get along, maybe it isn’t too shocking that Erdrich and Dorris collaborate to a much larger extent than do most writers” (Jones 5). Careful logistics and planning became crucial, as there were multiple priorities to be efficiently juggled: “We write at the kitchen table in the middle of five children. And we have to schedule our writing time because with five children and my teaching, there are so many other things to do” (Croft 89), Dorris said. The advantage of such a hectic situation was the absence of a writer’s block, as they could not afford the “luxury” thereof on such a demanding schedule.

The Artist’s Craft Dorris and Erdrich’s writing styles are dialogic. While describing his own writing practice, Dorris claimed he found it boring to write with an outline: “If it doesn’t surprise me line to line, there’s something wrong with it as far as I am concerned” (Chavkin and Feyl Chavkin, “An

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Interview with Michael Dorris” 185). Erdrich, similarly, never knows “the basic plot, it becomes more evident during the writing” (Feyl Chavkin and Chavkin 239). For Erdrich, the process of compos(t)ing relies heavily on subconscious mechanisms: “The novel comes to light as it is written. It gathers its own material and acquires life, substance. I’ve got everything and nothing to do with it” (Feyl Chavkin and Chavkin 243). In her hands the novel grows naturally. Improvisation becomes a poignant element in the process of composition. Erdrich claims she has no rules about writing. Sometimes a book has an outline and other times I feel my way along, piecing it together bit by bit until the book answers itself . . . .I skip around everywhere, writing the pieces that I can’t wait to write. It’s like always eating your favorite part of the meal first. (Feyl Chavkin and Chavkin 247)

She works and writes intuitively, even if it often feels like groping in the dark. Perhaps some of the anxiety of writing and not knowing where one is headed was alleviated by the partnership with Dorris, by the constant presence of an editor who was also a writer and a person who cared. Such co—operation could prove nurturing on many levels: they both learned from each other, it could be employed almost anytime (due to their physical proximity), it was dialogic and could involve instant feedback, and it could be interrupted whenever domestic episodes demanded their immediate attention, and resumed when the crises were taken care of.

Stages of the Literary Alliance Their co—operation evolved over the years. Tom Matchie discerned six distinct stages spanning two decades in the Erdrich-Dorris literary joint enterprise. Erdrich and Dorris met at Dartmouth College in 1972 where she, an undergraduate student, took his class in anthropology. She graduated in 1976, then received an MA in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins University, and worked in various capacities in different states. In 1979 she returned to Dartmouth to give a poetry reading and they met again. They kept in touch and started mailing each other manuscripts. In 1980 and 1981 she was a fellow at McDowell and at Yaddo Colony. In 1981 Erdrich was a writer-in-residence at Dartmouth, and they began meeting and discussing each other’s writing on a regular basis, and married a couple of months later. “Their marriage preparation was to a great extent literary,” Matchie writes (148). Strapped for money, they “took their first shot at co-authorship” (Grantham 13) and began producing romantic stories under the pen name

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Milou North: “Michael plus Louise plus where we live” (Grantham 13). The first stage encompasses their meeting, corresponding, working together on their various manuscripts, getting married, and writing as Milou North (Matchie 148). The second stage commenced in the early 1980s when, two weeks short of a deadline, they learned of the literary competition for Chicago Magazine’s Nelson Algren Prize. Dorris urged Erdrich to write and submit a story, and she shut herself off from their houseguests and children in the kitchen. She wrote the short story “The World’s Greatest Fishermen.” The circumstances were less than auspicious. Erdrich recalled that Michael had sprained his back, and the guests were trying to tend to themselves and to the children. Michael couldn’t move—he took Tylenol and tried to relax on the sitting room floor all that day and through the night. I would bring in parts of the story and he would hold them over his face to read them. (Grantham 14)

The story won the competition, and the Erdrich-Dorris literary partnership proved to hold future promise: “she is the primary writer, he the motivator—the one who makes suggestions about theme, language, characterization, and the like” (Matchie 148). This short story, along with others Erdrich wrote earlier, titled “The Red Convertible” and “Scales,” dialogically laid the groundwork for her debut novel Love Medicine. However, it took Dorris’ insight for Love Medicine to be “born,” for the short stories “didn’t become a novel until Michael entered the picture. I did not see that the bunch of episodes was really a long, long story. They all meshed and became a novel through a lot of late-night conversations between Michael and me until the plot was discovered” (Grantham 16). The dialogue between the two helped Erdrich discover the novelistic potential in the stories. Even after they submitted the story, they did not consider it the final version and conversed about the possible improvements. Dorris said: “[w]e spent so much time talking about how it could be rewritten when it came back . . . and then, when we won the prize, we had all this material . . . and then, the characters really kind of took off by themselves” (Cryer 83). Separate chapters of Love Medicine were published in journals such as The Atlantic Monthly, Ms., and The Kenyon Review (Grantham 11). Their joint efforts translated into the following distribution of tasks: Erdrich wrote drafts and Dorris helped “plot the novel” and devised “the order of the stories” (Chavkin and Feyl Chavkin, “Introduction” xi). The teamwork consisted of many dialogues and much editing: “We talked about the plots, the characterization, the conceptualization, the order, all

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that stuff, and then, as a draft or part of a draft is finished, Louise gives it to me, and I read it, and make suggestions and comments or reinforcements, as the case may be” (Jones 5). Editing could take different forms in their co—operation and was aimed at making the novel as reader-friendly, as coherent as possible: With Love Medicine, we read it out loud to each other when it was finished twice, slowly and did some integration between the various stories to tie them together and figure out the chronology and the relationships and all that stuff in a way that would be comprehensible to someone who didn’t know these people as well as we did. (Jones 6)

Matchie claims that Erdrich’s first three novels, i.e. Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, and Tracks, belong to this stage, where the two writers “both read the manuscript, often aloud, and talked about it; both made suggestions and rewrote, always reaching consensus on a word-by-word basis” (Matchie 149). During the third stage they were both already accomplished writers. Dorris had by then published essays, short stories, his first novel Yellow Raft in Blue Water (1987) and the autobiographical The Broken Cord (1989) (Matchie 150). Beginning in the mid-80s and continuing well into the 1990s, they gave numerous interviews in a mode Matchie termed “oral collaboration” (150). They alternated while answering the interviewer’s questions, they added to each other’s responses, and generally supported and polished each other’s statements while theorizing their co—writing and explaining their technique in an articulate manner. Interviews were dialogical, but interviews with both Erdrich and Dorris were doubly dialogical, for they conversed with the interviewer and with one another. Matchie speaks of “the couple’s tendency to bring out the best in each other. Still, these two are individual writers, and their styles are not the same” (Matchie 151), dialogic, but not the same. Their co—writing re— visits the myth of a solitary writer shut off from external influence, able to take all the credit for his/her work. The term “oral collaboration” also aptly fits the contents of their writing, especially when multiple narrators tell their own stories, or as Lyons posits that “In Erdrich’s work, orality appears in multiple narrative voices” (57). Whether they added to or substracted from each other’s stories, they co—operate and dialogically work at weaving a story involving all narrators and characters. Dorris remarked that one of the reviews of Love Medicine mentions the fact that nobody in the book is right, that in fact it is community voice, that the point of view is the community voice and the means of exchanging

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information is gossip, and so consequently there is no [single] narrator; there is no single protagonist, but rather it is the entire community dealing with the upheavals that emerge from the book and now will emerge from four books. (Coltelli 22)

Their co—operation, oral and written, resulted in Love Medicine, a novel woven out of multiple voices, of community gossip, dialogical from its inception to its form, content and reception (the revised editions attest to that). The fourth stage began with their work on The Crown of Columbus (1991), the major innovation being that both of their names were credited as authors. Considered by many critics as their least successful joint effort and denigrated for its detective story-like plot and a $1.5 million advance, it did not become a commercial or an artistic success. I argue it is an interesting gain for the academic novel subgenre, adding the Native American accents. The process of writing it differed from their previous work, as they wrote chapters alternately. I will come back to The Crown of Columbus in later parts of this chapter. During the fifth stage, after the publication of The Crown of Columbus, the two writers ceased giving interviews (Matchie 152). They continued working, and quite productively, despite family issues, yet their writing appeared “to be more individual than communal” (Matchie 152-153). Dorris was occupied with the aftermath of the publication of The Broken Cord, for two years answering letters from all over the country and dealing with criticism in the media. In the meantime, their son with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, who was the protagonist of The Broken Cord, was hit by a car and died. Dorris published Rooms in the House of Stone, a book of essays which “challenge[s] the reader to confront large human problems . . . . Such reflective pieces have little connection to Erdrich as a collaborator” (Matchie 153). This stage signaled the drifting apart of the two writers, two partners. Erdrich published a revised version of Love Medicine in 1993, the fourth novel of the tetralogy, The Bingo Palace in 1994, and The Tales of Burning Love in 1996. This new Erdrich, as Matchie observes, is more political, empowering female characters and advocating Native American matters. Critics saw the writer “as connected to the old, while becoming highly involved in the politics of the new” (Matchie 154). This stance became very clear with the publication of her later books and reaches its apogee in the new, radically revised The Antelope Wife and her new novel The Round House, both published in 2012. The sixth stage encompassed the years leading to Dorris’ tragic death in 1997. Erdrich moved out of their house in 1995. Dorris’ second novel

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Cloud Chamber was about to be published and included characters from The Yellow Raft, a clear tribute to the method of re—cycling during their co—operation on Erdrich’s first three novels, although it was no longer written with Erdrich. After their separation, Erdrich commenced working on The Antelope Wife, which was published in 1998 after Dorris’ death. Matchie calls it a curious novel when considered in the context of collaboration or the lack of it. Many things about it suggest a radical separation from Erdrich’s past writing and consequently from her traditional editor . . . .In the prologue to the novel, Erdrich thanks different people but then takes the blame on herself for any errors. It is as if she is conscious that her main editor is gone. (Matchie 155)

Perhaps she published a new version of The Antelope Wife years later (or many dialogues about it with different people later), because the 1998 novel lacked the dialogue with and the editorship of Michael Dorris? It is a challenge not to view this novel about disintegrating relationships as autobiographical, but Erdrich denied that it had anything to do with her marriage. Also, this sixth book is a novelty in the sense that it introduces an entirely new set of protagonists: the Shawanos, the Roys, and the Whiteheart Beads, as opposed to Pillagers, Kashpaws, Nanapushes, Lamartines, Lazarres and Morrisseys of the previous novels.

Stages in the Writing of the Novel Stages can also be distilled when it comes to their dialogic writing of novels. I rely mostly on the interviews to describe the phases in the process of writing a novel. “Once the idea is born, the collaboration” (Croft 90) could begin. In an interview Dorris said: “Once you write the first sentence, the first paragraph, the first chapter, you give it to the other one, and they go over it with a red pencil, crossing out, writing in new words, making exclamation points for something good or a star, if you’re lucky, or NO in big letters” (Croft 90). Next, days, weeks, and sometimes months, of discussion would follow, until eventually they would accept each other’s suggestions entirely: We go through the entire book that way and eventually read the whole book out loud to each other. That’s when we insert words, do the real finetuning. We both sort of know these books by heart. As a result, when they go to the publisher, almost no editing is needed. We are the toughest critics these books will ever see. (Croft 90)

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Perhaps it is not such a blasphemous definition of co—operation after all. It is a win-win situation. They were the toughest critics, but also the most dedicated and sympathetic to the success of the novel. Since they were both literary critics, professionals with training and experience under their belts, their partnership was dialogic on many levels. The dialogue between literature and literary criticism, a self-reflexive exercise in giving immediate feedback, appeared to be effective in their project of joint novel writing. Erdrich would give the written draft to Dorris, or she would read it out loud to him if she was particularly satisfied with it. He would make suggestions as her “gentle reader, a sounding board,” but a “hard-nosed editor” nevertheless (Grantham 11). Sympathetic dialogue was the key to their collaborative process, as Erdrich described it: “It’s sort of a conversational process; we just talk about it all the time . . . .We take lots of walks around here. It’s nice walking. And we talk about ideas for characters, and one of us gets excited about a conversation and starts writing something” (Caldwell 65). They were both triggered to write their novels on such occasions. They took turns as writers and editors. Perhaps long walks, and generally taking trips, was crucial to the process of writing and co—operating, cushioning the potentially painful side effects of criticism. Dorris commented: Then the person who isn’t doing the writing takes the piece of paper and brutalizes it . . . and tries to balance off the criticisms with little stars in the margin. It’s much stronger editing than we would tolerate from anybody else. We’ve gotten to the point of trusting that response, because in the beginning we had this agreement that we would never not say anything to spare the other person’s feelings. (Caldwell 66)

Writing and editing blurred and mingled at all times in the process of their co—operation, and editing was not reserved for the last stage, when the text was supposedly finished. They even edited it after the text was sent to the publisher. It seems that a constant dialogical back-and-forth constituted the basis of their literary co—authorship.

The (Im)Materiality of Writing Art and life melded in their household since they talked and speculated daily and incessantly about characters, their personalities, likes and dislikes, but they wrote their novels separately and in separate rooms, sometimes in separate houses. They plotted, edited, discussed and agreed

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on every word. The co—operation extended beyond “technique and editing.” Erdrich stated that Often one will pick up something that is under the surface in a scene or setting and say to the other, “There’s something more here. I don’t know what it is, but get it out.” It is sometimes even a painful process because it often involves something that you didn’t want to face in yourself or your character. (Brainard 135)

One of them might notice a hidden pattern which could have been problematic for the writer of a particular work. Then the co—operation could become very intimate, almost invasive. Perhaps it is easier to take such suggestions from a spouse than it would have been coming from a third party. Erdrich had to write on a regular basis, Dorris wrote in bursts (Foster 171). They both worked on several projects simultaneously and went through numerous re—visions, but they never used the word “perfectionism” in that context, a word which would have been justified, but does not necessarily represent their efforts.

Reading While Writing Many creative writing manuals claim that in order to learn how to write, you have to read a lot first. Some writers read while they write, some do not, for fear of influence, of subconscious plagiarism perhaps. Erdrich’s favorites include several canonical master storytellers, e.g. Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, and Gabriel García Márquez (Feyl Chavkin and Chavkin 232-33). Her writing has also been compared to theirs. “I always read” (Chavkin and Feyl Chavkin, “An Interview with Michael Dorris” 196), Dorris said, and his advice was to read everything and read a lot and learn how to accomplish certain things and how to avoid certain pitfalls from the books or articles or whatever you’re reading . . . .You learn from the classics, you learn from Shakespeare, you learn from Faulkner, you learn from very American writers like Eugene O’Neill and Sinclair Lewis and Tennessee Williams things about plot and the cadence of speech. (Chavkin and Feyl Chavkin, “An Interview with Michael Dorris” 196)

While enumerating writers who affected her writing, Erdrich lists Michael Dorris as the most important and the most lasting influence, in particular for the expertise and motivation her husband provided:

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I am indebted to him for organizing and making the book into a novel. I tended to be a person who thought in terms of stories and poems and short things. The book [Love Medicine] became a novel because of Michael. He came one day and said pretty much, “Oh, this is a novel,” and . . . we began to write it in that way. (Coltelli 26)

In a dialogical gesture she said: “You learn from the people you read, but you also learn from people that you listen to” (Caldwell 67). Dorris echoed her words: “But more than from anyone I’ve learned from Louise” (Chavkin and Feyl Chavkin, “An Interview with Michael Dorris” 196). This openness to learning from other authors is dialogic. Both admitted to having had an impact on each other’s writing and they never mentioned being apprehensive of plagiarizing anyone’s style while reading or listening to other literary voices.

The Myth of a Writer as a Solitary Genius Writing books is to a certain degree contingent on collaborative efforts between the writer and a group of librarians, researchers, experts, colleagues, friends, and family members. The professional expertise (editing, inspiration) and domestic aid they offer sometimes go uncredited, sometimes are acknowledged. Yet, the author’s writing is mostly performed in seclusion. The Erdrich-Dorris literary joint venture debunks the myth of a literary genius writing in splendid isolation. As Cryer argues: Among writers of serious fiction, collaboration as intense and close as that between Erdrich and Dorris is virtually unprecedented. Literary scholars believe, for example, that Leonard Woolf’s aid was indispensable to Virginia Woolf’s writing in this century and that of George Henry Lewes to George Eliot’s writing in the 19th, but no one contends that either man figured so directly in what actually was set down on a page. Among contemporary writers, there seem to be no parallels. (Cryer 84)

Their co—operation punctured the stereotype of “a solitary genius whose art is purely the product of his or her own creation without any external ‘contaminating’ influences” (Chavkin and Feyl Chavkin, “Introduction” xii). Topographically, they were often isolated, living in the countryside, working in separate spaces, nevertheless “their work style would destroy anyone’s romantic image of the lonely writer off in a garret” (Croft 89). Dorris claimed that the working out of their arrangement could be attributed to the fact that “I think she and I have the same ‘ear,’ in the

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sense that as an artist has an ‘eye,’ a writer has an ‘ear’” (Jones 5). They made sure the novel had an auspicious aural character by reading their manuscripts out loud to each other. They then polished and revised the work. Dorris attributed the successful intimate literary partnership to their shared backgrounds: “middle class” and “mixed blood” (Grantham 11), which is contrary to what Bakhtin said about the novel, its potential harbored in differences, not homogenisms. Dorris insisted on the specificity of each writer’s experience and contribution: “We’re not saying there is no individual creativity. Obviously you have to bring all of your experience, something very personal, to write. But it is really mixed in with collaboration” (Wong, “An Interview” 37). Sharing similar values and epistemologies aided in the process of dialogical revising—which does not mean that they saw eye to eye (heard ear to ear?) on everything: Sometimes, since Louise is a poet, there will be certain combinations of words that will be just irresistible, and it is my unfortunate task to say, That’s a beautiful combination, but that person would never say that. Then we argue about whether they would or not and in the process figure out a little more about who that person is. (Jones 5)

It is difficult not to feel proprietary about one’s own writing, but a dialogic relationship they seemed to cultivate perhaps enabled them to get past even those challenging moments of not being able to see beyond a graceful line the other person wants to get rid of. Dorris remarked: “I read with pencil in hand . . . and I mean pencil. The final decision is Louise’s” (Grantham 17). Having this intimate a partnership with each book they wrote, she thought that: “You’ve really come to some kind of an understanding that you wouldn’t have done alone. I really think neither of us would write what we do unless we were together” (Bruchac 103). They spoke of “individual trance” when they wrote separately, but also of experiencing “collaborative trance” when they were working together (Foster 172). She described it somewhat paradoxically: The heart of our collaboration is a commitment to one another’s separateness. I certainly respect the solitude and silence it takes for Michael’s work, and he does the same for me. The idea of linking brains or even working in the same space—I find that impossible . . . .In a collaboration such as The Crown of Columbus we shared in one book the creations of our own selves, but the source itself, that is well closed except to the free wondering of an individual mind. In each of the books we’ve written separately, it is that source, naturally, that dictates the substance of the work. However, there is no putting aside the sheer volume of sweaty

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maneuvering it takes to shape books, and we have done so much of that between ourselves. (Feyl Chavkin and Chavkin 226)

It was a partnership, where they were dependent on each other and yet in need of solitude to write as well. In order for the dialogue to take place, they ensured solitary periods of writing first. Editorial teamwork paved the way to official shared authorship resulting in The Crown of Columbus.

The Crown of Columbus: “handing the computer disk back and forth” Despite the close and complex nature of their co—operation, they decided against publishing jointly. They made an exception to that rule and published The Crown of Columbus under a joint byline in 1991. Dorris described the project: “In the Columbus book, we’re both writing 50-50 . . . basically handing the computer disk back and forth” (Brainard 136). The tasks were distributed equally: they conceived the plot and did research together, each wrote first drafts of chapters and they swapped the revised versions. The process of writing together was different from their previous form of co—authorship. The most significant difference constituted the fact that both of them wrote the same book, instead of only offering suggestions for revision. As Erdrich noted: We did it as we always do. We always talk, and so we talked talked talked talked talked about the book, and talked about the plot and the characters . . . We sort of made the rules up as we went along. Michael could hand me something and say, “What’s next?” I could do the same and say, “Plot that . . . .” (Foster 170)

The novel was born out of a dialogue between the two writers and continued to gestate: they literally wrote it in a series of reciprocal gestures of writing alternate chapters. Dorris said, they had “talked about it for years and years. We’ve started working on it, and we’re greatly relieved that the main character sounds the same whether Louise is writing her voice or I’m writing her voice. She’s got her own voice already, and we both hear it the same way” (Moyers 140). With the publication of The Crown of Columbus, and other novels they worked on together, Dorris and Erdrich, according to Ann Rayson, resist being labeled as they connect male to the female narrative voice, the Native American to the EuroAmerican perspective. Because of their working methods and mixed

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Their multiple dialogues stemming from their background (e.g. Modoc, Ojibwe, French-Canadian, German, Jewish, Polish), their identities (e.g. father, mother, teacher, poet, writer), resulted in a form of writing difficult to pinpoint. One cannot say it is woman’s prose for it has been either edited or co—written by a man. It is not exclusively Native American writing for it concerns the Euro-American perspective as well, The Beet Queen constituting a prime example. The Crown of Columbus tells a story of two Dartmouth College 1 professors, Vivian Twostar and Roger Williams, who embark on a quest to locate “a missing page of Columbus’s diary and a golden crown that he is said to have brought to the New World” (Stookey 5). Instead, they discover the Crown of Thorns Christ wore when crucified: “Columbus’s gift to the New World thus serves as an emblem of the suffering of Native American peoples after contact with the Christians of Europe” (Stookey 5). Vivian Twostar is a mother to a teenager, a scholar, Roger Williams’ lover, and about to give birth to her second child. A Professor of Anthropology close to being tenured, she juggles academic tasks and community work. Being the token American Indian woman scholar, she is expected to write a re—visionist article about Christopher Columbus. She feels a certain bond with the traveler, she could relate to Columbus, stranger to stranger. There he was, no matter what version of his life you believe, pushing and pulling at the city limits of wherever he found himself. An Italian in Iberia. A Jew in Christendom. A Converso among the baptized-at-birth. A layman among Franciscans. He spoke all languages with a foreign accent, and his sight was always fixed away from the heartland. He didn’t completely fit in, anywhere, and that was his engine. He was propelled by alienation, by trying to forge links, to be the link . . . . (CC 124)

 1

The university Erdrich attended; in 2009 she received an honorary doctorate of letters from Dartmouth and delivered the main commencment address; Dorris worked and taught there; he was the founder of the college’s new Native American Studies program in the 70s.

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Vivian Twostar can identify with Columbus, “an ethnically confused man” (Passaro 165) always testing boundaries of the multiple identities he was equipped with. Vivian dialogically, and facetiously, describes her own complex identity: I belong to the lost tribe of mixed bloods, that hodgepodge amalgam of hue and cry that defies easy placement. When the DNA of my various ancestors – Irish and Coeur d’Alene and Spanish and Navajo and God knows what else-combined to form me, the result was not some genteel, undecipherable puree that comes from a Cuisinart. You know what they say on the side of the Bisquick box, under instructions for pancakes? Mix with fork. Leave lumps. That was me. There are advantages to not being this or that. You have a million stories, one for every occasion, and in a way they’re all lies and in another way they’re all true. When Indians say to me, “What are you?” I know exactly what they’re asking, and answer Coeur d’Alene. I don’t add, “Between a quarter and a half,” because that’s information they don’t require, first off—though it may come later if I screw up and they’re looking for reasons why. If one of my Dartmouth colleagues wonders, “Where did you study?” I pick the best place, the hardest one to get into, in order to establish that I belong. (CC 123)

Her mixed-blood identity is unfinished, ambiguous and has “lumps.” She claims the agency to choose who she wants to be in what context. In her tenure year and about to give birth, Vivian has her hands full and would welcome security; however her case is “not an orthodox promotion case . . . .My curriculum vitae was top-heavy with teaching experience at four different schools but light on . . . scholarly productivity” (CC 13). Interestingly, her achievements are teaching and service, two academic activities performed in dialogue with people. Whereas her publication record, writing done mostly in solitary confinement, leaves a lot to be desired. It seems she is not a very research-oriented academic at first. Of her multiple roles, she says: “By day I was Assistant Professor Twostar, hotshot lecturer in anthropology, an authority, a professional woman as well as the decent, responsible mother of a provoking and eccentric sixteen-year-old son. Most evenings I was simply Vivian” (CC 10). These are not separate personas, but facets of her identity which are in dialogue. She is not a stereotype, she is complex and ambivalent. At no time is she just an academic, or a mother, or a woman. Rather she is a professional woman worried about her son and about her career, or her relationship with the self-absorbed Roger. While examining a library card with a picture taken on her first day at Dartmouth College, she reflects on the expectations she encounters when being identified as an American Indian:

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She applied all the accouterments she believed a Native American woman should display, according to knowledge she received, pasting herself in a role she believed herself socialized into. In the course of her life, she learns how to rebel against being perceived solely through the lens of ethnicity and thus also against being excluded. Due to her gender and ethnic heritage, people expect Vivian to be a spokeswoman for different causes, feminism and Native American issues constituting the most obvious example. Vivian would like to control and decide what she is, yet everybody around her is busy assigning her with roles: “There are times when I control who I’ll be, and times when I let other people decide. I’m not all anything, but I’m a little bit of a lot . . . .‘Caught between two worlds,’ is the way we’re often characterized, but I’d put it differently. We are the catch” (CC 124). Cognizant of her agency, of her choices, Vivian is bent on making decisions concerning her identity. She realizes her mixedblood potential need not mean to be victim-like “caught between two worlds,” it can translate into a dialogic exercise of the self, adapting to situations. Rosenthal underscores the conviction that being “in-between” is an asset and Vivian is aware of this when she puns on the word “the catch” The “catch” is the gain, the profit from cultural contact, not the pitfall . . . catch stands for a chance, an opportunity. Whereas “to be caught” signifies a victim position, to be “the catch” indicates a subject position with agency. Yet, “catch” also denotes a trick or snag, something we trip over, that challenges the normal flow of things. To be “the catch” also could mean being a productive obstacle in what we usually perceive as normal or real. (CC 108)

Vivian Twostar is in a dialogic relationship with stereotypes and assumed representations of women and American Indians. She questions and subverts them. She is the catch, not the caught. Vivian’s partner, Roger Williams, also tries to become “the catch,” as he creates his own image, controlling what is said about him. He describes himself as a “well-known narrative poet, critics’ darling. Byronic media star recently featured in People magazine brooding on a plaster bust of his subject, Columbus, and poising a Mont Blanc pen against his handsome chin” (CC 16). Since he is

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a white male academic, he can apply only professional labels, surround himself with relevant accessories denoting status, class and profession (leaving gender and ethnicity out) and can become the catch for the media, critics, and students. The main protagonists are two academics, whose relationship is at first based on love games, and later on co—operation in life and work. They “are trying to figure out their relationship, they’re trying to figure out shared parenthood, and all the time they’re trying to figure out who Columbus was” (Foster 169). Vivian narrates eleven and Roger nine of the twenty chapters. One has the impression that she is the stronger character of the two, more resilient and yet more adaptable. “The mixing of voices works well. It helps to develop the characters, to advance the plot, and to underline the theme of discovery” (Beidler, “A Review of The Crown of Columbus” 48). Stookey catalogues the novel as “part historical fiction and in part a mystery-adventure and a tale of romance” (5), similarly to LaVonne Ruoff who viewed it as “a romance, detective story, adventure tale, and postcolonial response to the consequences of Columbus’s invasion, . . . also a sharp academic satire” (185). Another dialogue is here at work: that between the subgenres within the space of one novel. In several interviews Dorris claimed to have learned everything he knew about writing novels from Erdrich. He spoke of being her apprentice and, as Matchie points out, this sounds plausible because Dorris “began to publish novels much later than she” (Matchie 149). Dorris once noted about their dialogic co—operation while writing The Crown of Columbus: There was one magic moment in which I was absolutely stalled and I didn’t know what to do, and I called Louise up [across the road] where she works, and I said, “What do I do?” and she said, “I’ve just started working out this particular section,” and it was actually Roger in an encounter with a shark, after he jumps overboard. And she said: “I will give this up, and you write this. Your assignment is to write Roger overboard, what happens to him.” And it was just great to get an assignment. (Foster 171)

They were two writers working on a book, both writing and editing it. Erdrich said: “We worked on it in a different way. We both faced the blank page. I gave Michael what I’d written, he gave me what he’d written, and we were free to add scenes and play around with it a lot more than we’ve done with the other books” (Schumacher 181). Their concerted efforts peaked in the writing of this novel. Dorris was supportive of Erdrich, even prioritizing her work over his. In the novel Roger Williams eventually acknowledges the importance of Vivian Twostar’s scholarship.

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In the turmoil of her life and in the course of an extraordinary chain of adventures, Vivian makes a great scholarly discovery, but almost loses her baby daughter, her teenage son, and Roger, only to retrieve them all and build a family. She publishes “the unexpurgated, annotated version of Columbus’s Diary” (CC 375), which gains her fame. Roger, previously narcissistically concentrated on his work alone, recognizes this and assumes responsibility: The demands upon her time are many and important, and she must be away more than we’d like. There’s not a great deal I can do to assist in her endeavors, but I offer help where I can—such as completing the alumni magazine piece on the historical Columbus, an article which now bears both our names as author. (CC 375)

This last sentence could potentially allude to the Dorris-Erdrich literary partnership, of complementing each other in life and work, irrespective of gender-based distribution of daily chores, and benefiting from the dialogic model of co—operation they practiced. How come their most overtly dialogic novelistic production was said to be the least successful? It was substantially criticized and “Much of the controversy about this novel has focused on what some have felt was a failure to treat with appropriate seriousness the devastating impact of Columbus’s arrival on the futures of native peoples” (Ruoff 185). In other words, Dorris and Erdrich’s artistic vision was not considered appropriate in its treatment of the subject matter. But that is a subjective opinion one can respectfully disagree with. I think that The Crown of Columbus is quite successful in writing a contemporary “sequel” to Columbus’ story. In a 1985 essay titled “Where I Ought To Be: A Writer’s Sense of Place,” and co—authored with Michael Dorris (Wong, “An Interview” 43), Erdrich claims contemporary American Indian authors have a mission: “In the light of enormous loss, they must tell stories of contemporary survivors while protecting and celebrating the cores of cultures left in the wake of the catastrophe” (Wong, “An Interview” 48). Vivian Twostar, a Native American, successfully shapes her own life. Her fluid identity, her affiliations push her to seek things everybody else takes for granted, and to venture into perilous territories. It is her questioning of the ascribed and preconceived labels, roles, and functions, which gains her fame, respect and personal happiness, thus giving a positive and inspiring example to readers.

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Re—Visions and New Visions Dorris and Erdrich not only re—wrote the novel in the sense that they re— defined the concept of authorship as a dialogic practice performed in tandem, but they also re—wrote the published novels literally. Erdrich has re—written her debut novel and twice published it anew. Tracks, which was Erdrich’s first finished draft, was published as a third novel of the initial tetralogy after it was “thoroughly revised and changed in the light of the characters that we know from the other books” (Coltelli 29). Dorris and Erdrich would re—write even supposedly finished manuscripts sent to the publisher: we thought The Beet Queen was completely done in November. We sent it out; it was duplicated at the publishers. It was even sent out to some other writers for comment. But it just nagged at us and nagged at us . . . we started rewriting it from page 206 on. In a month we rewrote pages 206 to 393 and made a whole new ending. That last fifteen pages are completely new. (Wong, “An Interview” 36)

This quote strips the act of novel-writing of the potential sense of finiteness, of all of its false security writers and readers alike seem to believe in. Published books were ongoing projects. Erdrich pointed out: “I have not revised previously published work, but I do add to it, as stories or additional scenes occur. There is no reason to think of publication as a final process. I think of it as temporary storage” (Feyl Chavkin and Chavkin 231-232). Apparently re—visions and re—writing are not synonymous. The 1993 edition of Love Medicine presented a new artistic vision with four new chapters added. The idea of “temporary storage” corresponds well with the practice of revising and re—writing, insofar as it robs writing of a sense of absoluteness, eternal authority. Writing novels in the case of Erdrich has a re—cyclable quality, as it uses the same material many times over. Questioned about the revised version of Love Medicine and its character as a replacement or a new version of the story, Erdrich answered: The original will go out of print, but of course there are always libraries. I have no great plan for the reader here—some may prefer the first version without the additions, others the next. I don’t think of the books as definitive, finished, or correct, and leave them for the reader to experience. (Feyl Chavkin and Chavkin 247)

Erdrich acknowledges the legitimacy of the recent novel without diminishing the role of the former version. The last sentence challenges

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traditional Western notions of the “masterpiece,” a finished, published entity revered for centuries to come. Dorris and Erdrich’s theory and practice of writing novels corresponded well with Bakhtinian theories of the novel as a dialogic and evolving genre. Taken down from a pedestal, the compost pile of a novel can be subject to numerous re—visions, can be published anew, can be written in a tandem, can be extended and have installments, thus attesting to the genre’s open character.

Michael Dorris: Husband, Writer, Editor, Literary Agent Dorris’ first novel A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (1987) was written in collaboration with Erdrich. The protagonist was initially male, but in the course of their conversations they came to the conclusion it would be more interesting to make him female. The process of creating a character acted itself out in the writer’s mind, but also in real-life contexts: Once I had a character in mind, I would begin to develop her. If Louise and I were looking through a Sears catalogue, we would ask, “What would this character pick out in clothes to buy?” when we went into a restaurant, we’d ask, “What would this character order from this menu?” (Croft 87)

They dialogued extensively when building characters and Dorris described how meticulously they would plan their protagonists: “We sat down one day and drew [the characters’] pictures. Just did anything that would help us get a hold of them . . . .We would do a lot of plotting and just take notes. Whoever is writing the book writes a draft based upon that” (Cryer 83). Writing, plotting and conceiving literally were part of their lives: “we dream about these people. We wake up in the middle of the night and have new episodes for them,” Dorris said (Schumacher 183). Erdrich confirmed that “We can’t get rid of them” (Schumacher 183), and Dorris once observed: “It’s almost like we’re listening to them” (Caldwell 69). This is an example of a dialogical phenomenon, a dialogue with the characters, theorized and also described by Barbara Tomlinson in her essay “Characters Are Coauthors: Segmenting the Self, Integrating the Composing Process.” This personification of characters “appearing” and “speaking” to writers is not exclusive to Erdrich and Dorris. Other writers, e.g. William Faulkner or Joyce Carol Oates, depicted them “as collaborators in the process of writing” (Tomlinson 424). What follows is an inter—action and dialogue. The collaboration does not always run smoothly: the characters might try and take charge, interfere and defy the author: “writers may sometimes perceive their characters to hinder as well as help” (Tomlinson 429). They act as co—authors: “They intervene in the writing process by stimulating,

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suggesting, demanding, criticizing. They take charge of or contribute to the development of structure, direction, theme, incidents, and dialogue” (Tomlinson 425-426). Their characters are insistent, ubiquitous, autonomous and agential, they do not “merely serve as subjects of the narrative” (Tomlinson 425). They demand a dialogue with the writers, to have a say in the process of composition: Erdrich explains that “Sometimes they [the characters] surprise you. They do things you don’t expect, and that’s how a story develops. Just like life—things don’t happen in one, two, three order” (Croft 87). The voices of characters, the subject matter can take over, or in the words of Erdrich: I really don’t control the subject matter, it just takes me. I believe that a poet or a fiction writer is something like a medium at a séance who lets the voices speak. Of course the person has to study and develop technical expertise. But a writer can’t control subject and background. If he or she is true to what’s happening, the story will take over. (Bruchac 96)

Total authorial control might be an illusion, and perhaps not enough credit is given to the frenzy of inspiration. Either way, writing can be a dialogue with the voices of the characters, voices waiting to emerge. Erdrich explains how her books come into being: I have little pieces of writing that sit around collecting magnetism. They are drawn to other bits of narrative like iron filings. Eventually, by some process I am hardly aware of, the pieces of writing suggest a narrative. One of the pieces might be told in a particular voice—that voice might tell everything. Or an image might throw the piece into third person—or whatever person. I don’t have control over whether I get ideas, voices, images. The trick is to maintain control and to shape what I get. (Halliday 2012, 9)

The process is dialogical, if sometimes beyond Erdrich’s control, as she claims not everything is up to her and the trick is to allow that to happen without trying to contain the entire process. Dorris was not only in a dialogical relationship with Erdrich as a husband, editor, and writer, but he also acted as her agent. When Love Medicine was sent to an agent and there was no feedback, Dorris took the initiative and decided to become her literary agent and to sell Erdrich’s books. While she acknowledged editors at publishing houses and gave credit where it was due, she said “With no one do I have the sort of relationship I share with Michael Dorris” (Feyl Chavkin and Chavkin 245). Their partnership was marred by marital and familial issues, followed by Dorris’ tragic death in 1997. In an 1997 article by The New York Times

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journalist Rick Lyman, she said “I knew that Michael was suicidal from the second year of our marriage.” She has not addressed it before in public, it was a private matter and Dorris did not reveal that side to the world and friends. After his suicide, she cautiously talked about it and clarified misconceptions that had arisen. She also talked to her daughters’ classmates about the suicide. “There was no one reason, there were many reasons,” (Lyman) she claimed, among them Dorris’ depression and severe insomnia and the toll it took on both of them. Dorris was charged with sexual abuse of their adopted children and a friend said that “He could see no way out and said he couldn’t bear the thought of being charged with such crimes. He was concerned about the effect on his children, his mother, Louise and his work” (Lyman). Erdrich and her lawyers asked to keep the case closed in order to prevent their children.

After Dorris: Erdrich’s Later Books In a 1988 interview Erdrich was asked whether she would write without Dorris, and she said: “I don’t think I would. I don’t know that I’d feel the same urgency anymore. I always thought before that I’d be a writer no matter what, but . . . I never would have dreamed I could dig that deep if it hadn’t been for him” (Trueheart 121). Yet, she continues to write until today; a new novel LaRose was published in May 2016. She was an established, autonomous writer already when the marriage began disintegrating. She has found a community of people who became her sounding boards and started working in dialogue with other editors from her publishing house. She admits she talks about her books with fellow writers, e.g. Gail Caldwell. Of her cooperation with her editor, she says: Terry Karten has been my editor since The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. I have no rule about when to show her something; I trust her, and often we talk about books I’m thinking about before I do show the work to her. She is ruthlessly honest, has superb instincts, and is a true book person. There are probably very few relationships like this left in the publishing world. I have also worked with Jane Beirn all of my writing life—another person of the highest caliber. I don’t know what I would do without her. (Halliday 2010)

In her novels after Dorris, she thanks her family, friends, people who she had dialogic relationships with, i.e. those, who helped with research, told her stories, collaborated with her as editors, and taught her Ojibwe: “Often when I’m trying to speak Ojibwe my brain freezes . . . I try to improve the Ojibwe language used in the book. As I learn more or I consult my

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teachers, I learn how much I don’t know. Ojibwe is something I’ll be a lifelong failure at—it is my windmill” (Halliday 2010). The language of her ancestors has become very important to Erdrich over years.

An Amended Interview and Perils of a Home Office I wanted to believe that their dialogue was perfect and ignored the critical voices which were trying to point out that there are limits to a dialogue and this partnership needs to be treated with a grain of salt. I did not want to think about the limits and even perhaps of the dangers of a dialogue, especially a public one, discussing the charges against Dorris. But then I read a different version of the Paris Salon interview Lisa Halliday conducted with Louise Erdrich, parts of which were published in the 2012 revised version of The Antelope Wife. I was initially only familiar with the 2012 and not the 2010 version. The 2010 one contained information previously unknown to me and shocked me into a revelation that silences are a part of a dialogue. I realized that there was something troubling, something almost incestuous about two writers sharing literally everything. Michael Dorris was Erdrich’s husband, editor, and agent. I started wondering about the perils of a home office, of spending so much time together, it becomes suffocating. It is an inter—connectedness taken to its limit, exaggerated to a maximum. What made Halliday edit the interview so drastically and silence the author so conspicuously in her 2012 rendition of that interview?2 Who and what intervened? Here is the most poignant fragment of the interview: INTERVIEWER You wrote The Crown of Columbus with your husband, Michael. How was that different from the experience of writing your other books? ERDRICH I’ve not spoken much about what it was like to work with Michael, partly because I feel that there’s something unfair about it. He can’t tell his side of the story. I have everything that we once had together. It touches me that he left me as his literary executor. I think he trusted that I would be good to

 2

I am referring here to two texts by Lisa Halliday: “Louise Erdrich, The Art of Fiction No. 208.” The Paris Review, issue 195, Winter 2010, theparisreview.org/interviews/6055/louise-erdrich-the-art-of-fiction-no-208-louiseerdrich (referred to as Halliday 2010) and “Louise Erdrich, The Art of Fiction.” Reprinted from The Paris Review, The Antelope Wife: A Novel. New and Revised Edition, Harper Perennial, 2012, pp. 2-14 (referred to as Halliday 2012).

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York for an interview with The New York Times. I was walking out the door to meet the interviewer, and I noticed that he was dressed up, too. So I asked him where he was going. He said, “I’m going to be in the interview.” And I said, “No, they asked me.” And he said, “What do you mean—I can’t come?” So it was both of us from then on. As long as he was content with being in on the interview and saying what he needed to say, I wasn’t that unhappy. Actually, I was tired. Love Medicine and Jacklight were published in 1984, and I had a baby. The Beet Queen was published in 1985, and I bore my second daughter in that year. What kind of woman can do that? A tired woman who lets her husband do the talking because she has the two best things—the babies and the writing. Yet at some point the talking infected the writing. I looked into the mirror and I saw Michael. I began to write again in secret and put together a novel that I didn’t show him. INTERVIEWER Was he a good agent? ERDRICH He was a terrific agent. He had the energy for it, and the excitement about the book world. He was a very good and generous editor, too. Not to mention a teacher. (Halliday 2010)

Then Halliday suddenly stops asking about this subject and switches to something else. The co—authorship of Erdrich and Dorris bore visible fruit: Love Medicine won major literary awards. Erdrich remarked that “there isn’t even a word for it. We’re collaborators, but we’re also individual writers . . . I really think neither of us would write what we do unless we were together” (Bruchac 103). It seemed that they were indispensable to one another, they catalyzed each other’s writing and merged their lives in writing: “For Erdrich and Dorris, authorship is a dimension of matrimony: They can be married to their muses without risk of infidelity” (Truehart 115). Their literary partnership produced also The Beet Queen (1986), Tracks (1988), The Bingo Palace (1994) by Erdrich and A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (1987); The Broken Cord (1989) by Dorris; and The Crown of Columbus by Erdrich and Dorris. This interview presents an altogether different picture of the dialogism so idyllically presented in the initial interviews. These passages reveal how fraught with problems their dialogue was after all and how jealousy, lack of integrity, and low self-esteem might have informed that relationship from the beginning. How psychologically draining and possibly parasitical it could have potentially been, not as impeccable as they initially portrayed it to be. In light of this evidence, books such as The Antelope Wife or Shadow Tag could be read and understood anew as they narrate stories of suffocating relationships, usually of men stifling women who need their

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freedom and a lot of room to breathe, create, live. This poses a fundamental question about the limits of dialogue, its impossibilities and its perils, too. Also, I wonder whether it was more of a clinging and toxic relationship, sometimes emerging as a dialogue? This remains an unsolved issue complicating the thesis of this study.

CHAPTER III A CASE STUDY OF THREE EDITIONS OF LOVE MEDICINE (1984, 1993, 2009) AND TWO EDITIONS OF THE ANTELOPE WIFE (1998, 2012)

Re—writing, revising, and re—publishing a novel all signal a dialogic process at work. What happens when Erdrich decides to re—write and publish anew her most successful novel Love Medicine? It was a bestseller which had garnered numerous awards, e.g. the National Book Critics Circle Award for the best work of fiction in 1984, the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy and Institute for Arts and Letters Award for best first novel, the Virginia McCormack Scully Prize for best book of 1984, the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, the Great Lakes Colleges Association Award for best work of fiction, the L.A. Times award for best novel of the year in 1985. All of these prizes must have somehow attested to the fact that the novel was good the way it was. Erdrich also re—wrote The Antelope Wife and published it fourteen years after its first appearance. What are the effects of such practice? Revising, re—writing and re—publishing work that was presumably a finished product challenges the notion of a literary work and presupposes doing something with a novelistic work that is not common at all. It is a form of literary ecology, or re—cycling, of manufacturing something new out of something old. This is because Erdrich’s concept of the novel departs from the traditional understanding of how a novel is created, i.e. by a solitary genius who once she/he finishes writing it, is done with it. I argue Erdrich understands and employs the novel’s potential for unfinishedness. Her writing and re—writing practice brings to the fore questions of a single best text versus textual pluralism (Chavkin 87), i.e. the possibility of co—existence of different versions in an ongoing inter—textual dialogue. The re—visions undermine the supposed stability of the text

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while, as is the case with Erdrich’s works, simultaneously forging more inter—connections between the novels and making her series-like oeuvre more intra—textual. The practice of revising harks back to the oral tradition when a story is told and re—told many times and always emerges in a slightly different form. In this respect the author seems to be saying that literary texts and Native American oral tradition can enter into a dialogue. Even novels, which are considered to be the final, stable products in the process of Western storytelling, can be revised, re—written, re—told, therefore their finiteness constitutes an artificial construct. Erdrich, an “obsessive reviser” (Chavkin 88), stows away her own books in “temporary storage,” until a need or necessity appears for her to revise them. Employing the openness of the novel, Erdrich conceived of a textual scheme: what was initially a tetralogy of novels, became “one long book.” Despite a significant amount of critical acclaim and attention it received, Love Medicine: A Novel mutated into the 1993 Love Medicine: New and Expanded Version (Chavkin 84), and in 2009 into Love Medicine: Newly Revised Edition. Although there are instances of novels published anew as revised versions, “there have been very few instances in which a major modern novel has been so substantially revised and expanded as Love Medicine [1993 version] was,” Chavkin notes (Chavkin 84). Few writers challenge the illusion of security of their published novels and respond dialogically to criticism.

The Quandary of Tracks Tracks, the first novel Erdrich wrote, was published as her third. The chronology of writing is not synonymous with the chronology of publication. It was rejected many times, yet she “kept it . . . the way people keep a car on blocks out in the yard—for spare parts” (Halliday 2010). She used the stories from that manuscript in Love Medicine and then later she published Tracks in a different form. The image of a car with spare parts aligns with her ecology of writing, of re—cycling old parts and creating something new. Erdrich showed the manuscript to A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff, who commented: The 1981 manuscript called “Tracks” was a wonderfully creative and imaginative book that was not quite ready for publication. One of my suggestions to her, which makes me laugh now, was to abandon linear plot and use a more disjointed narrative. The original “Tracks,” which has never been published in its entirety, is not the same novel as Tracks. (Ruoff 183)

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Some part of the advice found its way into Erdrich’s writing, while disentangling the stories that belonged to Tracks from those that were to appear in Love Medicine. Love Medicine defies the linear plot and Tracks has a more chronological structure. Love Medicine, according to Chavkin, has a complex “textual history” (88). Parts of the book were published in magazines (sometimes in an altered form) and exist in multiple versions (Chavkin argued this before the third version of Love Medicine was published in 2009), thus to trace the origins of the story verges on the impossible. To disentangle stories takes time, effort, and meticulous editing. In the process of re—vision, a creative stage for Erdrich, parts of one novel seeped into the other novel, until the plots made sense.

Re—visions as Dialogue In 1988 Dorris already foretold the future potential of Erdrich’s (re— )writing practice: “after all four books are published, or however many books there are . . . there may be some changes made in the text of Love Medicine or The Beet Queen to reflect what we know now” (Trueheart 119). Revised versions of Love Medicine were meant to mesh the four books of the tetralogy. She was integrating them by working on details, which screw-like inter—connect the individual novels and stories. The re—visions are about re—thinking the dialogic connections between them and establishing new connections in the process. Here, the metaphor of a compost pile is especially apt: from the soil of old matter new things develop. An ecology of writing takes place. Erdrich says I revise as I type, and I write a lot by hand on the printouts so they feel repossessed. I have always kept notebooks—I have an obsessive devotion to them—and I go back to them over and over. They are my compost pile of ideas. Any scrap goes in, and after a number of years I’ll get a handful of earth. I’m working right now out of a notebook I used when I wrote The Blue Jay’s Dance. (Halliday 2010)

Compost pile processes are going on, an inter—action between its elements produces something new and different. The following analysis of re—written and newly published novels will attempt to discern and investigate the effects. The re—vision brings out complexities in characters and generates new dialogues between characters and also between individual texts. Some changes arm some female Native American with more agency. In consequence, re—visions highlight evolutions in the author’s political stance.

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Love Medicine: The 1984 and 1993 versions The first version of Love Medicine has fourteen chapters, seven firstperson narrators and a third-person narrator. The first chapter is set in 1981, the second chapter goes back in time to 1934, and from then on the novel progresses chronologically but in irregular time intervals to 1984. That does not become modified in the 1993 version, but four new chapters and a second section to a chapter are added. Chavkin speaks of unifying mechanisms employed in the novel, for many critics argued Love Medicine (1984) was a collection of short stories (85). Erdrich herself, however, called it a novel: “It’s a novel in that it all moves toward some sort of resolution” (Wong, “An Interview” 47). Dorris reinforced this idea: “It has a large vision that no one of the stories approaches” (Wong, “An Interview” 47). According to Chavkin, the unifying devices are “the inclusion of a common regional setting, repeated images (especially water), recurring themes, repetition of events narrated from different perspectives by different people, and humor” (Chavkin 85). The work is mosaic-like, and it can be said that its “tesserae: the separate following-units of multiplefocus narrative eventually signify as a whole something quite different from what they represent individually” (Altman 289). I argue that by claiming that Love Medicine is a collection of short stories, the critics see individual narratives instead of a multiple-focus narrative with multiple plots, thus reducing the multiplicity to a manageable size. These seemingly disjointed episodes, unresolved conflicts, incomplete memories and multiple voices, sometimes conflicting, sometimes in agreement, reflect the fragmentariness of life. There is no single true story, no single narrator who is omniscient. The reason for some alterations might be the fact that reviewers oftentimes criticized her writing as not being political enough or as employing negative stereotypes of Native Americans. Re—visions in her novels dialogically address some of the criticism aimed at her work. In the early stages of her writing practice she claimed she was not interested in Native American issues and just wanted to write. Her political alliances evolved in the process of her maturation as a writer and a person. She attended classes in the Native American Studies department, began writing about and advocating Native American matters, started learning Ojibwe, revised her political views and her books. Once she had established herself as a writer, she became more and more outspoken politically. In November 2012 Erdrich, while accepting the National Book Award in Fiction for The Round House, prefaced her speech in Ojibwe.

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The changes range from minor to major. Minor changes include corrections of spelling mistakes, words added and/or deleted, sentences inserted or deleted. Minor word changes occurred. Initially it was: “Later on, the dark falling around them at a noisy bar” (LM 84, 3), in the 1993 edition it is: “Later on, the noise falling around them at a crowded bar” (LM 93, 4) describing the situation when June meets Andy and they spend time together. Somehow “noise” and “crowded” correspond better with each other, but it might be a matter of aesthetic impression. Sometimes it is the looks of protagonists that change. Thus, the sisters Zelda and Aurelia trade characteristics: Zelda’s “careful permanent” is now Aurelia’s and Aurelia’s “flat blue-black ponytail” is now Zelda’s (LM 93, 14) in the kitchen scene. The bar Aurelia manages, named cynically “So Long” (LM 84, 17), becomes a nameless bar later (LM 93, 18). Rushes Bear has twelve children (LM 93, 18), instead of eighteen (LM 84, 17), which potentially could have aimed to counter some of the stereotypes of Native American women as very fertile. Geographical details are corrected. “Father Upsala” (LM 84, 193) becomes “Father,” probably to allude to Father Damien from other novels, or to resist introducing new elements and to tie the novels together. More significant emendations included the character of Fleur Pillager. The girl from a family of “Blues” (LM 84, 194) snatched by a water monster from her rowboat, becomes “Old Lady Pillager” (LM 93, 236), and thus Fleur Pillager is introduced into Love Medicine. This achieves continuity and coherence, for the memory of that incident reverberates through subsequent books. “Old Man Pillager” (LM 84, 241), or Moses, who is the protagonist of an added chapter titled “Island,” becomes “Old Lady Pillager” (LM 93, 241), Fleur Pillager, the medicine woman everyone is scared of and Lipsha considers going to for love medicine. What is the effect of this character and gender switch? It equips a female character with more power and independence. Not only her cousin Moses, but she herself can dispense medicine and heal.

Alterations to the “Wild Geese” Chapter The most significant change occurs in the scene portraying the encounter between Nector and Marie in the chapter titled “Wild Geese,” which had previously been interpreted by readers as implying rape (Stookey 30), and as catering to stereotypes about Native Americans. By adding the sentence “I touch her with one hand and in that touch I lose myself” (LM 93, 65), Erdrich changes the mode of their meeting, introduces tenderness. In order to make it clear that sexual intercourse did not take place, she replaces. the

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sentence from the 1984 version: “I know that isn’t true, that I was just now the first, and I can even hear the shake in her voice, but that makes no difference” (LM 84, 61), with “I know that isn’t true because we haven’t done anything yet. She just doesn’t know what comes next” (LM 93, 65). In interviews Erdrich noted that: the encounter between Marie and Nector was mistakenly ambiguous. I never meant it to be a rape and took a word or two out in the republished Love Medicine to make that clear. Reading it over, I too found it confusing and wanted to clarify his act (wrong, but not technically a rape). (Feyl Chavkin and Chavkin 234)

These alterations are meant to alleviate the risk of a reader seeing Nector as a rapist, or, in the words of Chavkin: “Erdrich’s dramatic revision of this scene suggests that after the publication of the 1984 Love Medicine she was concerned about misreadings, especially those where the Chippewa are simplified and reduced to whores, rapists, drunks, and other traditional stereotypes of Indians” (Chavkin 92). The scene was revised in dialogue with criticism and her political consciousness.

Added Chapters Given her Native American background, her books are bound to be viewed as political. She is well aware of this fact and says: “There’s no way to speak about Indian history without it being a political statement” (Schumacher 174). Chavkin argues that the re—visions, i.e. the additions of chapters such as “The Island,” “Resurrection,” “The Tomahawk Factory,” “Lyman’s Luck,” and the new section added to “The Beads,” serve to present a political vision consisting of four objectives (94): “to argue for the importance of preserving American Indian culture and resisting complete assimilation into the dominant white culture;” “to undermine the popular stereotypes of American Indians;” “to promulgate a feminism that is in accord with traditional American Indian culture, underscoring the crucial role of motherhood and independent women who are activists for Indian rights;” “to present a more affirmative vision than the one in the 1984 Love Medicine, which for some readers reinforced the notion that the situation of American Indians today is hopeless, and to suggest that there are possible political solutions to the dire problems confronting American Indians” (Chavkin 93-94). She revises because she perhaps does not believe that the novel is the final product in the course of writing. Re—visions result in her work becoming more political. By tracing the alterations, I will attempt to show

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the effects of changes in Love Medicine and in The Antelope Wife. Erdrich’s [re—]vision is one in favor of cultivation of American Indian culture and heritage, of alleviating stereotypes of Native life, of empowering female members of Native society, of a more positive and agential picture of Native Americans to be handed down in books for future generations to read and cherish. Erdrich claims that her primary audience includes Native American peoples, “hoping that they will read, laugh, cry, really take in the work” (Coltelli 25). Yet, she also wants to reach a wider readership in order “to be able to present Indian people as sympathetic characters, non-stereotypes, characters that any non-Indian would identify with” (Coltelli 26). For Native Americans the novels might carry political and empowering messages, for other audiences they might strike home elsewhere. The facets of re—visioning and revising will be made apparent in the following analysis of added chapters.

“The Island” “The Island,” the only story without a date in Love Medicine (Chavkin 95), suggesting a timeless episode, recounts Lulu’s tale in the first person. It is added in the 1993 version and positioned between “Wild Geese,” narrated by Nector, and “The Beads,” narrated by Marie. The character becomes more rounded, more complex. Thus, all parties of a complicated love triangle reverberating throughout the novel are located next to each other (Chavkin 95) and are thus in a subtle dialogue. Abandoned by her mother Fleur Pillager and sent off to government boarding school against her will, Lulu is miserable and it is only due to Nanapush’s efforts to claim her back that she returns to the reservation. Yet she is confused, for schools like the one she attended were meant to assimilate American Indians, preventing them from speaking their native languages and violently separating them from their heritage and traditional ways. She goes to live with Moses Pillager. The nurturing relationship she enjoys with him is meant to restore her connection to herself after she had been alienated at school, and to tradition, to make her whole again and salvage Pillager characteristics: strength and trickster ability to heal and survive. The union results in the birth of Gerry Nanapush “who eventually grows up to become an activist and trickster hero” (Chavkin 98) and does justice to his Pillager and Nanapush names and legacies. This chapter presents important insights into Lulu’s character, her sensuality, her generosity, and her thirst for love generated by her mother’s absence. It helps the reader to comprehend her

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later comportment. She enjoys her femininity and her attraction to men. Conventions mean nothing to her and whenever she needs a man, she reaches for him, even if he is married. Her intentions are not evil, on the contrary this is her way of celebrating life, love, and herself. She becomes a “woman with a sudden body, fierce outright wishes, a surprising heart” (LM 93, 71). By including a chapter focusing on her positive relation with Moses, Erdrich mollifies possible interpretations of Lulu as a promiscuous American Indian woman. At the same time, the text empowers Lulu, since she is in control of this relationship and the ones to come. Lulu does not believe in stark opposites, but in continuity, in blurred lines: “Right and wrong were shades of meaning, not sides of a coin” (LM 93, 76). She is also empowered by her Ojibwe heritage which will guide her in her long good life, the “Mino Bimaadiziwin” (Madsen 1), translating into living well despite drawbacks, living with courage, generosity, knowledge, and love. She leads an adventurous life, she re—defines traditional gender performances and task distribution: “I’ve never shed one solitary tear. I’m not sorry. That’s unnatural. As we all know, a woman is supposed to cry” (LM 93, 277). She does not conform to gender stereotypes and refuses to have regrets. She manages her own life despite the attempts of others to control and limit her thoughts, emotions and actions. In the process of re— visions, Erdrich has empowered Lulu. She is a powerful woman figure who preserves her American Indian identity and defies popular stereotypes of “a squaw,” thus offering a more positive and agential role model the readers can identify with and be inspired by.

“The Beads” The added second section to the chapter titled “The Beads” explains Marie’s need for a mother, since her attempt to gain the love of Sister Leopolda (her biological mother, a fact she is not aware of) fails. It also elucidates her wish to become white by becoming a nun, a frustrated effort as well. Her issues with familial bonds are reminiscent of Lulu’s issues. She finds a mother figure somewhere else. While giving birth, Marie is helped by her mother-in-law Rushes Bear. Initially, their relations are strained and off-hand. In the course of a difficult labor, a surprisingly nurturing link forms between the two. The bond, a dialogue between daughters and mothers (not necessarily related in a biological sense) is a common theme in Love Medicine and other novels by Erdrich. June, who was abandoned by her mother, similarly struggles with relationships in her life and searches for unconditional love before she dies tragically. Her

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presence reverberates like a haunting memory (Chavkin 86) and Love Medicine revolves around her life and death. Her absent presence has impact on the fates of most of the characters: her husband Gordie, her sons Lipsha and King, her lover Gerry, and Marie who adopted her. Rosenthal points out that the story of June’s (mis)adventures is narrated by “14 different narrators” throughout the four novels (Rosenthal 125) in a Faulknerian gesture. The characters in this section are made more complex by the longings they exhibit, universal needs for mutually nurturing human relationships.

“Resurrection” Another added chapter, “Resurrection,” is divided into two parts dealing with Marie and her son Gordie. It mostly concerns Marie after Nector’s death and Gordie after June’s, both coming to terms with memories, despair, and loneliness. The chapter continues the logic of the added section of “The Beads.” The first part depicts a difficult relationship between the two characters: Gordie’s alcoholism is destroying his life and Marie tries to save him. The second part is a flashback when Gordie remembers June, his late wife, their highs and lows. According to Chavkin, in the 1984 edition Gordie appears only in the chapter “Crown of Thorns,” which presents him as a hopeless drunk, thus reinforcing a harmful stereotype (Chavkin 103). The new chapter depicts Gordie and June in love. June, who is otherwise portrayed as unstable and unpredictable, is shown here in a more positive light, and the readers can be more sympathetic towards her (Chavkin 103). The chapter “humanizes them, making it less likely they will be interpreted as the sluttish squaw and the violent drunk” (Chavkin 104). It attributes Gordie’s drinking problem to his inability to cope with June’s loss and mourning. The chapter also concerns Marie and “reveals aspects of her character not seen in the 1984 Love Medicine” (Chavkin 104). She realizes that the alienation from heritage and tradition can cripple one’s identity. She blames herself for failing to convey this to Gordie and June, who are drifting hopelessly through life as a result. While living at the Senior Citizens Home, she starts speaking the traditional language and becomes appreciative of Ojibwe customs. When she finds Nector’s pipe, she saves it for Lipsha, one of her adopted children with the greatest potential to savor Ojibwe tradition. She does so also because he is a descendant of the Pillager clan, although most of his life he was ignorant of this fact. Chavkin observes that “Resurrection” follows the chapter entitled “Love Medicine” (both set in 1982), in which a troubled Lipsha tries to harness

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his healing ability to help others, but because he dilutes the medicine with Western ways, it backfires. Despite adverse circumstances (Nector cheats on her most of their married life), she remains strong and acts as a mother figure to many children, her own and adopted ones. This positive message is important especially for Native American readers who might also be looking for positive role models in literature.

“The Tomahawk Factory” and “Lyman’s Luck” These two new chapters appear before the very last chapter in Love Medicine and Chavkin attributes special meaning to this strategy. They are different from other chapters insofar as their focus is more on the social and economic problems of the community . . . .Moreover, the tragicomic tone of the preceding chapters created by the cumulative impact of stories of abused children, suicide, alienation, violent behavior, loveless sex, random deaths, and broken families, is alleviated here by the farcical satire and the lighthearted humor that are different from the dark comedy and survival humor in the other parts of the novel. (107)

These chapters serve as comic relief in order to counter the stereotype of American Indians as victims unable to find their place in modern world. Lyman becomes a more complex protagonist in the 1993 version. He is portrayed as a conflicted Native American individual, “torn between his need to maintain his allegiance to the beliefs and values of his heritage and the desire to assimilate and become a ‘successful’ modern American” (Chavkin 107). He is troubled by other things beyond that, for example by the fact that he is an illegitimate son of Nector who has never acknowledged him. In the 1984 version, Lyman mourns his brother’s death, and his mother Lulu says “He could not snap out of it but slowly improved his outlook by working. He became a contractor, hired on his brothers, and in that way supported us all” (LM 84, 228). The 1993 version depicts a different form of grief: “He could not snap out of it but went down lower, lower, lower, to where nobody could drag him up. He stayed alone in the oldest shack, where he could party all he liked” (LM 93, 289). This chapter narrates Lyman’s account of what happened to him after Henry’s death and encourages empathy with him. He is a much more cynical character of a businessman in The Bingo Palace, competing with Lipsha for Shawnee’s heart, but perhaps the insights from these two chapters redeem him in the

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readers’ eyes. After depression and substance abuse, Lyman pulls himself together and starts his successful entrepreneurial activities. Both Lipsha and Lyman are descended from Pillagers, and they are both in dialogue with their heritage, they probe it and experiment with it, which often has comic results. Lipsha devises a love medicine according to his own recipe, and Lyman’s factory produces “fraudulent Indian artifacts” (Chavkin 109). But in the end, the factory is destroyed and the workers cannot pretend anymore that their culture is not shamelessly exploited. Lyman apologizes to Marie for his behavior and lack of respect. The short chapter “Lyman’s Luck” presents a potential solution to the fiscal problems of the reservations. Lyman acknowledges the importance of American Indian tradition and capitalizes on it, which foreshadows the themes tackled in The Bingo Palace. His political direction changes and he is more tradition-oriented now, he strives to be modern and in dialogue with the American Indian heritage and values. We also learn of the nascent and surprising friendship between Nector’s wife Marie and his lover Lulu. Lulu and Marie become involved in politics and develop ties to the American Indian Movement. All of this is not to say that the first version of Love Medicine is not political, Chavkin claims, because it does address issues such as “sovereignty, assimilationism, Indian activism, substance abuse, problems of the Indian Vietnam War veteran, clan rivalries, ambivalence over Indian identity, reservation politics, and cultural alienation” (Chavkin 111). Erdrich re—published Love Medicine to tie the novel more logically in with her other books initially constituting the tetralogy (Chavkin 112). The alterations were meant for the whole series to meld together better, or according to Bennett: “Some of the new material does improve the novel by tying up some loose ends and also by adding symmetry to the novel” (Bennett, “A Review of Love Medicine” 115). According to Chavkin another effect was to make the book more positive in its message, lighter in tone without undermining the issues the Native Americans grapple with. However, it should be apparent that these two versions of one novel “present different visions because of different authorial intentions. Neither version can be considered ‘definitive,’ for each is unique, embodying Erdrich’s ‘real intentions’ at the time she composed that version of the novel” (Chavkin 112). In any case, if one wants to comprehend Erdrich’s work and craft and do it justice, one needs to read both versions dialogically and pay attention to the author’s evolving motivations and the resulting textual effects.

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The 1993 and 2009 editions In a brief “Author’s Note” to 2009 Love Medicine: Newly Revised Edition, Erdrich explains her re—visions, having again re—written, re—woven the strands of the novel twenty-five years after it debuted and sixteen years after she re—published it: Once again, this book is a little different from previous editions. I have worked over a few small sections that were added in 1995 [sic!], but the biggest change is this: I have deleted one of the chapters (“Lyman’s Luck”) added in the 1995 [sic] expanded edition, and moved another (“The Tomahawk Factory”) to the P.S. section at the back of the book. I did this because I was surprised to find how thoroughly “The Tomahawk Factory” and “Lyman’s Luck” interrupted the flow of the final quarter. “The Tomahawk Factory” was one of the first pieces I wrote, so it seems to belong to Love Medicine. In the end, I am leaving it rather loosely attached. (Erdrich, “Author’s Note” 5-6)

The changes to the 2009 version result from her altered reading of the novel, of finding two sections not quite in harmony with the flow of the entire novel. This is a subjective reading of a writer who has authored the novel, it cannot be compared to the reading experiences of other readers. She admits the new version is different but also underscores its parity with earlier versions. She is leaving it up to the reader to read or not to read the chapter she moved, but her greater priority at this point is to have the prose flow and form “one long book”: Since writing Love Medicine, I have understood that I am writing one long book in which the main chapters are also books titled Tracks, Four Souls, The Bingo Palace, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, and The Painted Drum. The characters appear and disappear in my consciousness—a lamentable, messy place. If you read on in the other books, you will find that the people in Love Medicine live out destinies invisible to me as I wrote this first book. Although I sometimes wish that these imagined people would speak in a linear fashion, I can only, truly, be grateful they come back at all. I write about them as they present themselves. I really have no choice in this matter. That they keep returning, insistent and surprising, is a strange gift. Indeed, they have not finished with me yet. (Erdrich, “Author’s Note” 5-6)

She promises continuity, not linearity, since this is how she works and writes. This quote echoes Barbara Tomlinson’s argument about protagonists living a life of their own, functioning independently of a writer’s wish. Their coming and going, speaking and being silent influences Erdrich’s

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need for re—visions. The dialogue between the writer and characters attest to a dialogic writing process. Erdrich leaves out The Beet Queen, the novel least concerned with Native American characters. Bennett considers Love Medicine, Tracks, and The Bingo Palace to “work so closely together that they lock together in a tight circle, pushing The Beet Queen . . . to the side” (Bennett, “A Review of The Bingo Palace” 83). She suggests doing away with the concept of a tetralogy in favor of a trilogy: “It seems safe to say that the four novels are part of a continuing series and that the three closely related novels are a trilogy within that series. Surely The Beet Queen cycle will continue later” (Bennett, “A Review of The Bingo Palace” 84). And The Beet Queen cycle does continue later, with the publication of The Master Butchers Singing Club, but I will argue the novels fall into three major clusters and will elaborate on this in the fifth chapter to counter this theory of containment. The 2009 Love Medicine is embellished with a hand-drawn family tree, unlike the previous versions but very much like later novels by Erdrich. For example my 2001 editions of The Beet Queen (1986) and Tracks (1986) already have them, along with an annotation: “Family tree handlettered by Martie Holmer.” It is a formal ploy as well as a thematic one, for families are at the core of Erdrich’s novels, everything revolves around them. The 2009 novel consists of sixteen chapters instead of eighteen. Minor changes include word choices, words and phrases being deleted, spelling changed. I think alterations do not signal a more or less political standpoint, but are more concerned with the formal facets of the text. I will be quoting passages with additions or deletions to depict a different aesthetic. Changes to the 2009 edition will be thus marked: deleted words and sentences will be in square parentheses.

“The Island” Most significant changes occur in “The Island,” the chapter which accounted for Lulu’s passionate nature in the 1993 edition. Fleur’s absence in Lulu’s life is slightly mollified and not terminal, there is a hope they will perhaps reunite: I never grew from the curve of my mother’s arms. I still wanted to anchor myself against her. But she had tore herself away from the run of my life like a riverbank [. She had vanished, a great surrounding shore – LM 93, 68], leaving me to spill out alone. (LM 2009, 68)

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Lulu’s longing is not as strongly articulated. The sentences: “I wanted to fill her tracks, but luck ran out the holes. My wishes were worn soles. I stumbled in those shoes of desire” (LM 93, 68) are deleted. Another passage illustrates how Erdrich is conveying the same message, but using different words: Following my mother, I ran away from the government school. [Once, twice, too many times. – LM 93, 68] I ran away so often that my dress was always the hot-orange shame dress and my furious scrubbing thinned sidewalks [beneath my hands and knees cracked slabs. – LM 93, 68] the matrons forced me to wash. Punished and alone, [I slept in a room of echoing creaks. – LM 93, 68] I made and tore down and remade all dormitory beds. (LM 2009, 68)

The imagery relating to Lulu’s harsh punishments is toned down, references to physical and mental torment removed as if to alleviate the violence perpetrated. Both versions underscore the fact that Lulu often runs away and as a result she is punished many times. Lulu’s nature is minimally tamed: I want to grind men’s bones to drink in my night tea. I want to enter them the way their hot shadows fold into their bodies in full sunlight. I want to be their food, their harmful drinks. [drink, to taste men like stilled jam at the back of my tongue – LM 93, 82]. (LM 2009, 82)

Her pregnancy appears less violent when an analogy is deleted: “The air around us was still, a bitter black and the baby twisted in me [like a wolverine – LM 93, 83]. The alterations slightly soften the imagery related to Lulu’s wild ways.

“The Beads” “The Beads” chapter and its second section, added in 1993, undergo changes. Marie, pregnant and neglected by her husband Nector, muses on her solitude: I knew it was a girl because of June, because of how bad I had yearned to keep her. And in spite of how we barely made it through each day, I wanted this baby. [The others were getting too big to hold onto tight, and – LM 93, 96] I lacked softness in my life, a sweet breath. I didn’t expect good to come from anything I did anymore, but I would have this little baby, mine alone. (LM 2009, 96)

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Marie’s sense of loneliness is quenched, she sounds slightly less desperate. Rushes Bear moves in with her and Nector. The initial rapport is still problematic, yet some of Rushes Bear’s fits are deleted and her life story is abridged: Soon she left off with bringing down the good from above, and started slinging accusations. [Sometimes, when my back was turned, she started pulling Zelda’s hair and pinching at the others. I’d almost yell at her to quit, but I had thrown off those old Lazarre ways and couldn’t make myself treat her that low. I’d simply move the children out of her evil path, leave her alone to stew herself milder like tough old game. The cool smell of the smoke drifted out on the wind. I decided I couldn’t live this way. Things must change. I could take the son’s absence but not his mother’s presence. The load was too much, and so, that cold afternoon, I told the children to wait and play where we sat and I walked back to go face to face with Rushes Bear – LM 93, 99] “Leave this place,” I told her when she began to call me names. I could take the son’s absence but not his mother’s presence. . . .“I have nowhere else to go.” So she tamed down and stayed. She had looked over the bleak edge of her life, saw that I was her last hold. [, and caught at me. – LM 93, 99] In the days that followed, I was surprised to find that she seemed to have noticed the shape of my loneliness. Maybe she found it was the same as hers. (LM 2009, 97)

Marie’s temper is censored, her ways are edited to appear more assertive, more in control of her life and able to protect herself and her children, perhaps to appear more credible when Marie and Rushes Bear reconcile in recognition of a mutual fate. The description of Marie’s labor is shortened, many of her troubled thoughts deleted, and the baby, no longer an “it,” more welcome: I was pinned in the dark, flat on my back with my eyes open [, trying to remember what I had forgotten. Sometimes I’d wake with the nagging pull of something left undone in the house. I lay there trying to recall what it was so I could sleep again, but nothing came, no task, no plan, no reason, no dream I could remember. And then the coals died. I could feel the seep of warmth, and reached over to push Nector’s shoulder, to wake him, but there was no one there. I slipped farther, breathed deeper, and did not stir. The cramps began – LM 93, 97] when the cramps began. Then the labor, building in me like small ripples. Maybe by the afternoon, I thought, [it – LM 93, 100] the baby would come. (LM 2009, 97-98)

This description is less graphic, more serene. The fragment about Nector’s absence, when she realizes she is about to give birth at night, is deleted and his status of an unfaithful, absent, ignorant husband is mitigated.

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Again, while Marie is laboring, some of her thoughts are deleted, the references to the old language are altered: I put my hand out and Rushes Bear put her hand into it. I turned my face away when the next one came. She did not let go. [Then I felt another person’s hand come down, on my brow, and it was like the touch of peace, such mercy. “N’gushi,” – LM 93, 102] “Nimama,” I said to her, and knew I’d die. (LM 2009, 99)

Throughout the 2009 text many Ojibwe words are deleted, some are replaced with other words in Ojibwe. Erdrich has been chastised for her incorrect usage of Ojibwe and it seems like an attempt to address the criticism. In the chapter “Love Medicine” an entire paragraph is gone, one referring to Marie’s resuscitated interest in the old language: “Ahnee, n’kawnis.” She stood in the doorway. Since she had lived among other old people at the Senior Citizens, Marie had started speaking the old language, falling back through time to the words that Lazarres had used among themselves, shucking off the Kashpaw pride, yet holding to the old strengths Rushes Bear had taught her, having seen the new, the Catholic, the Bureau, fail her children, having known how comfortless words of English sounded in her ears. (LM 93, 263)

It is curious Erdrich should delete that empowering passage. When Marie gives Gordie a clean shirt she says to him: “Beeskun k’papigeweyaun” (LM 93, 263); the phrase is absent from the 2009 version. The word “N’gushi” (LM 93, 266) is replaced with “Mama” (LM 2009, 261) when Gordie addresses Marie. The concluding paragraph of that chapter is also altered so as to keep Gordie alive and away from liquor, or at least express a hope that he will keep living despite his self-destructive impulses: There was no question in her mind that if she let him go he would get himself killed. [She would almost rather have killed him herself. – LM 93, 275] She was wide awake. [, more alert than she had ever been. – LM 93, 275] Her brain was humming in the dark. [, her head was full of nails. – LM 93, 275] Gordie was her firstborn. He had lain in her body in the tender fifteenth summer of her life. She had let him out in pain. She would kill him if he got out this time. [Now she could sense him – LM 93, 275] He was gliding back and forth, faster, faster, like a fox chasing its own death down a hole. [Forward, back, diving. She knew when he caught the rat. She felt the walls open. He connected, his heart quit, he went right through with a blast like heat-LM 93, 275]. On the third day he would rise though, she thought. He would rise and walk. [Still, – LM 93, 275] She sat

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firm in her chair and did not let go of the ax [handle – LM 93, 275]. (LM 2009, 271)

With the help of much deletion and re—phrasing Marie’s labor is depicted as less violent, Rushes Bear’s nature is made to appear slightly more likeable. The major gain is Gordie’s survival, signaling a hopeful finale of his addiction, a positive message to readers.

Cosmetic Changes? The modifications in the 2009 version I have traced are more of an aesthetic nature than the changes in the 1993 version. It is as if Erdrich deletes controversial or uncomfortable passages, perhaps for the sake of brevity, or gets rid of Ojibwe words or spells them differently, perhaps because Treuer criticized her use of Ojibwe in his Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual, and she became self-conscious while using it. These 2009 emendations do not necessarily imply a less or more explicit political stance, but a slightly different artistic vision of the novel, its language and imagery adapted after years of sitting in “temporary storage.” Thus, she questions the fallacious assertion that a published novel is the end product of creative process of writing. It can be but it does not have to be. It is legitimate to come back to one’s own writing after years and decide one’s vision has altered and to tailor the novel accordingly. This activity does not demean the earlier version but, in the case of Erdrich, I believe it grants validity to all the available versions. What it does undermine is the concept of the novel as a finished entity. The changes center around the three strong female protagonists: Lulu, Marie, and Rushes Bear. The contours of these characters are somewhat milder in the new version. Aesthetically they are portrayed with altered metaphors, which sometimes re—define what we already know about them, and sometimes add or erase a dimension of their behavior. The most visible modifications are the deletion of “Lyman’s Luck,” and “The Tomahawk Factory” being moved outside of the novel proper. These are changes that result in a better flow of events. Since she is the writer and these are her novels, she is free to edit them any way she pleases, she is the only one with the license to do so, the readers can be either pleased or displeased with the end effects and can stick to the version of Love Medicine they enjoy the most. This kind of inter—action with readership is rare but very welcome among those who enjoy agency of choice and are not fixated on the single “correct” version of a novel. The author produces options to be accepted, to be discussed, or be rejected, keeping up a

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dialogue with her readers. As Jacobs aptly puts it: “Stories do not end with their telling, but rather continue, transformed, in a circular manner, to link to other stories, to continue a new life in a new, never-ending life” (The Novels 14).

The Antelope Wife Fourteen years after publication Erdrich resuscitated The Antelope Wife into a new shape. The novel introduces a new setting (Minneapolis) and new characters, but narrative strategies remain similar to those of the initial tetralogy. In a note on the back of the new edition, Erdrich, again, explains her reasons which she realized many years later upon re—reading the novel: I was astonished that I’d dropped the powerful characters from the first thirty pages. Having discovered their flawed depth, I wanted them back. Once I started thinking of them and sketching out their lives, a different, overwhelmingly insistent vision of the book took shape. The voices I’d abandoned, new sources of humor, characters I’d thought I had given up, soon gripped me. (Erdrich, “About the Revision” 15)

Because her vision had changed significantly, she altered the novel. Again, the protagonists intervened, demanded attention, and another narrative followed. Inspired to resume the dialogue with the characters and the novel, Erdrich re—wrote it. This book is a dialogic exercise extended in time: It has taken me twenty years to understand where I was going when I first started The Antelope Wife. I think this was how the book was supposed to be written all along. Still, I have tenderness for the old version. It seems to me that the characters were patiently waiting for me to return and continue with their stories. (Erdrich, “About the Revision” 15)

Although Chavkin said of the 1993 Love Medicine that it was a unique novel in terms of its extensive re—visions (Chavkin 84), the revised 2012 version of The Antelope Wife, suggests that Erdrich’s alterations potentially concern all of her texts. Erdrich has added much new material and deleted much, re—arranged chapters and episodes within chapters, invented new characters. The changes in the 2012 edition are not transparent at all, are tangled, and to meticulously trace each re—vision within the novel would require a separate book. I will therefore describe and analyze relevant alterations selectively, not exhaustively.

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The 1998 and 2012 editions The 2012 version of The Antelope Wife is ornamented with a family tree the 1998 version lacked. When asked why she started adding genealogical trees to her books, Erdrich explained this dialogic gesture directed at her readers: “I resisted for many years, but then at readings people began to come up and show me their painfully drawn out family trees. At long last, I was overcome by guilt” (Halliday 2010). This is a doubly self-reflexive gesture: she creates a family of texts and prioritizes the theme of families and genealogies in her novels. The family as an organizing unit is crucial to the meaning of her novels about family relationships, biological or adoptive, traditional and non-traditional. These family trees at the very outsets of the novels will not let the reader forget what is the primary concern of her writing. Web-like visual representations of inter—connections, those family trees illustrate most of her novels, although they are more often encountered in auto- and biographical writing. The trees as complex charts remind the reader of silent bloodlines throbbing on the pages of Erdrich’s novels, or of sometimes secret, complex underground root system-like links between individuals – her fictional web of life includes people, events, places, and animals. These charts also attest to the fact that other relations can be more important and more lasting than blood relations, as is the case with Marie Kashpaw’s family, Dot’s family, or the NanapushFleur-Lulu triad (Gondor-Wiercioch 107). The structure of the novel, the division into four parts remains unaltered, but the distribution of chapters is modified and most of the chapters have been shuffled, jumbled, added, or deleted. It still has first and third-person narration, and humans and animals as narrators. It contains many tales, and the stories of troubled and obsession-ridden relationships between Klaus Shawano and Sweetheart Calico, Rozin Roy and Richard Whiteheart Beads remain at the core of the book. As a result of multiple changes the story is more coherent, but it is also a slightly different story told. I will address the changes thematically.

Atonement The story of Scranton Roy is enriched with the “making amends” episode. It is as if the story needed closure and fourteen years later received it. During a raid on Ojibwe village he bayonets an old woman. This is the moment where Erdrich picks up the story and writes a continuation of the tales of several powerful characters. No amount of home-made penance

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and reading of ancient philosophers brings solace or eases Scranton Roy’s mind. Along with his son Augustus, he decides to search out the woman’s people and offer them fiscal remuneration. They find her family and Scranton Roy is forgiven, but not because he gives money, but because he restores truth (AW 2012, 43). As a writer, Erdrich uses her power to right the wrongs in this context, she retrieves some sense of justice, be it tribal or human. The vision of the world and people stemming from this revised fragment is a more positive, and more empowering one, if a tad sentimental, the message being that it is crucial to reflect, to apologize, to right the wrongs. Augustus meets the great-nieces of the slaughtered woman, twins Zosie and Mary, and stays with the family. Because the twins are almost perfectly identical and because he is unable to tell them apart, he does not know which one he marries, and which one is pregnant. Eventually they both live with him and it was their scheme from the beginning —to confuse him and not to let him distinguish them, so they can stay together. He also makes amends for his father’s deeds when he helps the Native Americans with another unfair arrangement imposed on them: The Dawes Allotment Act of 1887. It transformed the land owned by American Indians into individual plots in order to assimilate them into a white culture of ownership and to sell significant parts of Native American land to white settlers. Since they only possess land and no money, they start selling it. Augustus works in a bank and assists with the process, wanting to ensure its fairness: “Invariably, he begged the person with the money to open a savings account. That rarely happened. The money usually flung itself around the town” (AW 2012, 35). Once he even “beat a speculator, nearly lost his job” (AW 2012, 36). The episode is invested with agency, with at least an attempt of repairing the wrongs, an individual’s shot at justice. It can have an inspirational effect. It is an inter—action, where the history of Catholic-Ojibwe encounters is re—imagined and re—written, a dialogue is attempted. Episodes describing Rozin and Frank’s wedding are deleted. Rozin’s ex-husband Richard attempts to sabotage their wedding in many violent ways. In the last one, he shoots and wounds himself lethally. In the 2012 version Richard tries to atone for his transgressions and start a new life. The tone of the book is more dialogue- and reconciliation-oriented.

Resistance and Agency Another added episode depicts the children of Augustus and Zosie and Mary almost being kidnapped and being brought to a government school

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by an agent. The children bravely resist and are finally saved by their father. The agent calls out that “the children would now grow up to be illiterate and violent drunks” (AW 2012, 47), but they are already wellversed in advanced mathematics, home-schooled by their father and taught Ojibwe by their mothers. Another stereotype, that of poorly-educated Native Americans, is exorcised. Moreover, this passage represents Native American resistance to boarding schools. It makes specific aspects of history visible. Consequently, it interrogates the white-Native American/Ojibwe inter—actions. One of the most significant alterations involves Deanna, Cally’s twin sister and Rozin’s daughter. She does not accidentally die of asphyxiation in the trunk of the car where she is hiding because she thinks her father is leaving them. In the 2012 version their father Richard knows he will be caught by the police for business crimes and thinks Rozin will demand a divorce because of this and because she, Rozin, has an affair with Frank. In the 1998 version he is overwhelmed by self-pity and resolves to commit suicide, in 2012 he speculates what he could have become had history run a different course: “If I had been educated on my home reservation and lived with my family and received instruction in our traditional ways, I would have been a medicine man” (AW 2012, 130). This is where Erdrich’s prose becomes more explicitly political. Richard is brooding on the fate of many Native Americans, about the future that he might have had but for government programs. The War Department program for Indian eradication in the beginning, then treaty-making or removal. If his reservation had not been clipped back severely his family would have had more land, perhaps enough to live on and farm. Then every kind of sickness. If the few left had not had their children forcibly removed and shipped off to boarding schools where they either died of fresh diseases or died of loneliness or survived and got drunk and run over in the road . . . then . . . .And if the few left after that hadn’t sold their land during the allotment years and become completely homeless and got tuberculosis sleeping on the ground, then . . . . (AW 2012, 130131)

He thinks of hundreds of years of colonialism and its ongoing aftermaths. He lists the injustices towards American Indians and considers how the past and history have converged in his life and influenced his fate. Perhaps he would not be illegally depositing toxic waste for a living, but would have “healed people with my ceremonial knowledge” (AW 2012, 131). In the 1998 version Richard Whiteheart had no second thoughts about his doings, the 2012 edition gives him a second chance and his speculations and introspection redeem him to an extent. It is not only about the

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character – the text highlights the collective dimensions of individual behavior, placing his deeds in dialogue with a historical context. It makes the devastating effects of certain government policies visible and it shows his awareness of these processes.

Politics, Power, and Cultural Knowledge In later chapters information on the American Indian Movement is added: Richard and Rozin meet during an AIM protest and become actively involved in the movement’s activities, i.e. they work for “more rights, more autonomy, and more power for all Native Americans” (Quennet 36). Also, we learn that Richard cheated on Rozin during those days, so that her affair with Frank is rendered understandable by this fact in the 2012 edition. In the 1998 version Frank is dying of cancer and Rozin leaves Richard to live with him, but in the 2012 edition she simply loves him and he survives the disease. Rozin manifests a more conscious activism: she “tried to put her politics into practice. She went to school to be a social worker but didn’t finish her degree. Sometimes she does community work” (AW 2012, 148). She appears to be more empowered in the 2012 version. She takes a break from men and from menial jobs by staying with her mother and her aunt in order to acquire traditional wisdom: “She just wants to stay with them and learn things, oh, cultural and spiritual things, maybe, and she wants her daughters near and she does not want to rely on a man to make her happy. Frank. Though she misses him. Well, but she can live with it” (AW 2012, 187). Her own and the girls’ well-being is of utmost importance, and once she has her family issues under control, she can feel empowered and can further pursue her own happiness. The 2012 version refers to specific cultural knowledge. An added chapter entitled “The First Mix-Up” narrates the story of Cally and Deanna’s umbilical cords being switched and discarded after their birth. According to Ojibwe beliefs, this is unfortunate, for the babies are to play with their own cords, and if these are mismatched they might later become sick. There are consequences of such action. First, the twins become lost when they leave the house with Sweetheart Calico. Then, they suffer from debilitating fever. They run away: “I fear the spirits are trying to take them away from me. What should I do” (AW 2012, 202), Rozin asks, and her mother responds that they need traditional Ojibwe names. The twins’ grandmothers dream the names for their grand-daughters. The importance of preserving the cultural knowledge is asserted by the critical situations the protagonists have to face and overcome. Being cut off from one’s roots

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and tradition can have grave consequences, it is better to be equipped with traditional knowledge which is powerful and can also heal.

Languages When confronted about revising already published work, Erdrich responds that she revises “At every opportunity. Usually, I add chapters that I have written too late to include in the original. Or I try to improve the Ojibwe language used in the book” (Halliday 2010). Her re—visions are spurred by the need for dialogue. She listens to and reads what reviewers and literary critics say and write about her books. But this dialogism is intentional, not systemic as in Bakhtin. Treuer criticized Love Medicine and The Antelope Wife in his 2006 Native American Fiction. This is also an example of a dialogical situation, fraught with potential risks, never entirely unproblematic, but a dialogue nevertheless. He disapproved of Erdrich’s ungrammatical use of Ojibwe in Love Medicine and The Antelope Wife. Erdrich amended the mistakes in the 2012 version. In the chapter titled “Blitzkuchen” where English, Ojibwe, and German inter—marry, phrases are uttered in Ojibwe (inaccessible to those who do not speak the language) and answered in English: “Babagiwayaaneshkimod atoon imaa oshtigwaaning jigaajigaadenig omajidengway,” said Asin hurriedly. “No,” said Ogichidaa, hurt and surprised at the meekness of his catch. (AW 2012, 61)

The scene is present in both versions: in order to save his life, the German hostage offers to bake the best cake his Ojibwe captors have ever tasted. Alluding to the 1998 version, Treuer observes that “Two very strange things are going on here:” while German is not translated, only accompanied by “vague, if vigorous, stomach rubbing and eating gestures” (Native American Fiction 59), the Ojibwe utterance “though much less complex, consisting of one word and a short phrase (as opposed to the compound sentences in German), is explained both contextually and in translation” (Treuer, Native American Fiction 59). This, according to Treuer, creates “a textual inequality between German and Ojibwe, not to mention between Ojibwe and English; Ojibwe is neither fluid, like the English, nor densely cryptic, a site of strange meaning and difference, like the German” (Native American Fiction 59). Treuer claims that Ojibwe is made superfluous by English translations, it is “textually irrelevant; it does not communicate useful information nor does it engage in that other trick

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of language by withholding information or meaning” (Native American Fiction 60). The revised novel offers longer, more complex sentences in Ojibwe. In addition, some Ojibwe words and phrases become altered, mistakes in German are corrected, and some German is translated. Treuer asserts that Ojibwe in the 1998 version “functions as an ornament, not as a working part of the novel’s machinery” (Native American Fiction 61). The text mainly includes individual words and not the language as a system. Thus, Treuer writes, “the use of lexical nuggets ends up feeling more like display, with language itself a museum piece” (Native American Fiction 62). The 2012 version amends this impression by employing Ojibwe much more extensively. As is the case with the 2009 Love Medicine, almost every Ojibwe word is spelled differently in the new version of The Antelope Wife. Some words in English are replaced with words in Ojibwe. In the 2012 version the Acknowledgments start in Ojibwe and end in English. Erdrich mentions Brendan Fairbanks, who “was my consultant for most of the Ojibwe language in this book; any mistakes are mine.” Erdrich also expresses gratitude to her sister Heid E. Erdrich, “who over the years helped me think about this book.” This new version was conceived in dialogical situations: with the protagonists who demanded attention and continuation; with Treuer whose criticism she responded to; with a language consultant, who helped polish her Ojibwe; and with Erdrich’s sister, also a writer. Conversations she had with Heid Erdrich, an author of poetry collections, might echo the literary alliance she shared with Michael Dorris. Erdrich’s writing seems to thrive on dialogic situations and communicating with different experts about different issues. Not every writer is willing to listen to feedback, especially if it is critical.

The Craft of Writing and Beading Both in her writing and in the interviews, Erdrich makes references to many everyday activities and phenomena, especially when consciously or subconsciously theorizing her craft, with the compost pile being one of the more graphic examples. The Antelope Wife alludes to beading, a Native American art. Stirrup claims that beading, along with twinning and repetition, constitute main motifs of the novel, which “is both story and theory” (106). Erdrich employs the metaphor when speaking of her literary technique:

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Revising this book was like repairing an old piece of beadwork. I stitched in new connections and added entirely new chapters. I dropped some chaos but kept some of the mistakes. Ojibwe floral beadwork usually employs one sinuous vine with marvelously inventive offshoots. That became my pattern for the book. The Antelope Woman’s narrative would be the vine, the chapters the flowers—some true to life, some wildly dreamlike, some a mixture of real and surreal. (Erdrich, “About the Revision” 15)

Beadwork is not finished, can be improved, re—woven, altered. Nothing is forever, anything can be subject to change and re—visions of the novels attest to that. Beading, as a cultural practice, is also related to history, it suggests a design of things. Stirrup sees it as a metaphor of family ties: “the characters and families quite literally echo the structure of the beadwork—strings of objects, relationships, ideas, individuals, in which components, despite making or suggesting a whole, remain distinct, separate” (112). The one long book is a case of another design at work, novels beaded together, inter—connected and dialogic. Some stories can be re—woven differently, as revised versions show. That Klaus Shawano kidnapped Sweetheart Calico from the deer people, “is meaningful. History is at work” (AW 2012, 217), the text suggests. Rozin Roy denies this and initially claims “History is random events, not fate, or coincidence” (AW 2012, 217), but, noticing the ties, she changes her mind and admits: “History won’t let up” (AW 2012, 232). In the 2012 version, Erdrich changes the stories, revives the protagonists and gives them second chances to exercise agency over their individual fates. She re—beads and re—writes histories, presents her own version of Ojibwe history, partly as it was or is, partly as it could have been. It is a history of desolation relieved by episodes of grace and humor. A similar metaphor relating to sewing can be employed when speaking of her writing and the multiple-focus narratives Erdrich prefers, for “Only by discovering a common denominator among characters and activities are we able to stitch together the studiedly separate strands of the multiplefocus fabric” (Altman 285). The reader is an agent, is “sewing” the story together while reading Erdrich’s work, or in Altman’s words: “multiplefocus narrative gives the reader a strong sense of playing God, of finding the formula capable of transforming not lead to gold but story to theme” (Altman 288). Readers of Erdrich’s books are sewing, beading their own story out of multiple stories by choosing which novels to read, which strands to tie, what to prioritize and what to discard. These processes are not always conscious and constitute individual dialogic reading experiences.

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The metaphor of beads and beading is further reinforced in the text, where it serves as a unifying device. The baby strapped to a dog and later breast-fed by Scranton Roy wears blue beads, which is significant, for it allows the mother to find and identify her daughter later in life. The twins Augustus marries earn their living with beadwork. They are bent on not allowing Augustus to differentiate between them, so that he cannot choose, and the twins will never be separated. All is related, stitched together: he is married to twins related to the woman his father killed. Histories inter— twine, individual fates are a part of a larger design. Beadwork is gendered, it is housework and woman’s work in the novel. Sewing in Western societies is also coded female. I think that beading in the context of this novel is meant to equip women with agency and independence. Beading has a metaphorical dimension, for when women are beading, “They are sewing us all into a pattern, into life beneath their hands. We are the beads on the waxed string, pricked up by their sharp needles. We are the tiny pieces of the huge design that they are making— the soul of the world” (AW 2012, 185). All human beings, bead-like, are sewn into the fabric of life, already designed but subject to small alterations. The beading result can be compared to novels: it is pliable and open-ended, can be mended, improved, changed. Beading is related to sewing, and an apt metaphor in German language, of “roter Faden” (literally: red thread, idiomatically: central theme, leitmotif, recurrent theme) illustrates the nexus of sewing and narrative text. June is a central character, or, since she dies in the first chapter of Love Medicine, she becomes a recurring motif to a story inter—woven in a red thread, for she is “an ever-present sine qua non for the narrative, an ephemeral thread from Love Medicine to Tales [of Burning Love]” (Stirrup 98). She connects the protagonists and episodes, she haunts their stories, she is indispensable. Alanna Brown points out that beading and storytelling are meant to stitch people together: “The Antelope Wife . . . demonstrates Louise Erdrich’s profound belief in the integrative power of stories to hold together the chaos and buoyancy of human lives” (88). The sense of community these cultural practices can create are integral parts of Ojibwe tradition. Beadwork and stories can be re—worked, re—threaded. There is no final product, save for subsequent dialogical versions with emendations triggering different aesthetic effects.

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Conclusion The first revised edition of Love Medicine resulted in a more pronounced political stance, the second involved changes that were more aesthetic. The new edition of The Antelope Wife brought about a new story. Similarly to the 1993 Love Medicine, it adds new episodes and explanations in favor of preserving Ojibwe culture and resisting assimilation. Improving Ojibwe language and making the history more visible are decolonizing interventions Erdrich employs in her novels. The 2012 The Antelope Wife presents protagonists that are not stereotypical Native Americans by investing them with self-reflective abilities and agential impulses; it promotes strong female characters capable of being independent and of pursuing their own dreams and ambitions; and paints a more positive vision of Ojibwes coping with the painful historical legacy. In addition, the changes also concern the Ojibwe language as a form of preserving cultural continuity. Thus, the amended, re—phrased, and re—told stories serve the purposes of: instruction and inspiration, i.e. passing on of history and culture. These additions were motivated by the changing artistic vision of one writer. Change, re—vision, adding to “the compost pile” comprise Erdrich’s method. I will re—use a statement I have quoted earlier, where Erdrich says that I revise as I type, and I write a lot by hand on the printouts so they feel repossessed. I have always kept notebooks—I have an obsessive devotion to them—and I go back to them over and over. They are my compost pile of ideas. Any scrap goes in, and after a number of years I’ll get a handful of earth. (Halliday 2012)

She is in dialogue with her own ideas and re—cycles them. The secret ingredient being time and perspective, she concocts something new from something old, once she realizes an idea resonates with her differently than it did before. Erdrich states she has written a different novel, although she has used the existing threads: The most thoroughly revised book I’ve ever republished is The Antelope Wife. It is really a completely different novel, but I feel it is the true novel that was hidden in the first version. The beginning is the same, and then the book changes utterly. Sometimes a writer needs fifteen or twenty years to follow the thread laid out by a set of characters and a narrative. (Halliday 2012)

The 1998 edition was stowed away in “temporary storage” until she started re—threading its fabric, adding, deleting, and modifying until the

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dialogical 2012 version emerged. Louise Erdrich sets a precedent and sets standards for revising previously published work. Re—vision can be viewed as a form of a delayed and inter—mediated dialogue with the text, its protagonists, its critics, and its readers. Erdrich’s revising or re— writing practice extends the Bakhtinian concept of dialogism beyond language and applies it to the practice of writing novels anew in correspondence with the author’s altered artistic and political vision, in response to the readers’ feedback. Her practice of revising destabilizes the novel as a genre, doing away with any security the writer and the reader might think they possess as to the finality of a literary work. This creates a space for more ambiguity, more open-endedness resulting in a complexity closer to our inter—connected reality.

CHAPTER IV “NURSING A BABY WHILE HOLDING A PEN:”1 INK & MILK; WRITING, READING & MOTHERHOOD (AND FATHERHOOD); PRODUCTION & RE—PRODUCTION

How is parenthood dialogic with writing? Mothers can be writers. Writers can be mothers, or fathers. I will explore the dialogue between creative and procreative, productive and reproductive processes and forces, and spotlight gestatory vocabulary used to describe writing, e.g. terms such as conception, gestation, birth, labor, and fertility. In this chapter, Louise Erdrich’s two autobiographical books: The Blue Jay’s Dance (1995), a memoir of early motherhood, and Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country (2003), a travel diary-cum-memoir, which foreground dialogically mothering and writing, will be analyzed. Erdrich’s reading practice, an activity accompanying parenting and writing, will also be mentioned, as will her community-oriented work: the bookstore she owns, her blog, the Facebook page, and the foundation she established. Her cultural and social work is a dialogue between parenting and family relationships and her practice of writing and reading. She opened the bookstore along with her daughters and set up the foundation with her sister. Those are entrepreneurial activities which also seem to involve her motherly and sisterly instincts. Her blog (birchbarkbooks.com/blog) and the Facebook site (facebook.com/louiseerdrichauthor) are in dialogue with her professional passions such as reading and writing. She is creative and productive in her writing practice as well as her life outside of writing, the common denominator in this equation always being the family. I start with definitions and specifications, however.

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(Feyl Chavkin and Chavkin 237).

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Autobiography/Memoir Quennet claims “Native American written literature in English started with written testimonies of historical events, some factual, some literary documents” (32). Autobiographical writing constituted the genre most often employed in the nineteenth and twentieth century and two kinds could be discerned: those written by Native Americans and those dictated by them, “as-told-to” narratives (Quennet 32). Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson in their seminal Reading Autobiography theorize the narratives of the self. They are dialogic and cannot be classified as “a single unitary genre or form,” but are forms of selfrepresentation inter—secting with “novel, biography, history” (18). Smith and Watson aver that since “social organizations and symbolic interactions are always in flux; therefore, identities are provisional” (38), contextbased and multiple, “not essential-born, inherited or natural” (39). They cite Bakhtin’s assertion that consciousness, and by implication identity, is dialogical, subject to social exchanges and resulting discourses, characterized by heteroglossia, i.e. “multiplicity of languages, words, and meanings” (39). Identities are always under construction, in process of becoming, and the selves are never “unified, stable, immutable” (Smith and Watson 61). Autobiography usually covers the entirety of its author’s life, whereas a memoir, though it may relate the whole life, more often uses only a part of it” (Yagoda 1), and foregrounds “interconnected experiences” (Smith and Watson 274). I think the latter assumption especially aptly describes Erdrich’s autobiographical writing. In her review of The Blue Jay’s Dance, Susan Castillo posits that autobiography as a literary genre has evolved from regarding the construction of the self as “hermetic, unchanging” to portraying “teleological, evolutive process of increasing individuation” (89). She references Roland Barthes’s assertion that autobiographical writing is a narrative construction subject to “editing, selection, and omission” (89), which sheds light on the mechanics of the genre and the innovations Erdrich’s writing introduces. Erdrich wrote The Blue Jay’s Dance in her late thirties, and it was published when she was forty-one years old. She was not an elderly individual with a fixed personality looking back on her entire life, but presenting her own truths, subjectively and highly selectively describing episodes, “interconnected experiences” from her life revolving primarily around her activities as a mother and as a writer. Castillo argues that the self Erdrich depicts is synecdochic. The self, definable in relation to a bigger unit, be it family, the community, or the surrounding environment, can be described via a trope in which a part is

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used to designate the whole. Erdrich juggles many roles and Castillo writes of “weaving together of narrative strands, of diverse backgrounds and selves which makes Louise Erdrich’s The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Birth Year, an innovative and provocative instance of autobiographical narrative” (90).

The Blue Jay’s Dance To pinpoint the book’s “generic matrix” (Skwarska 129) constitutes a challenge. One could treat it as a synecdochic memoir. As Castillo argues, synecdoche, describing “a relation of part to whole, would be the rhetorical trope which characterizes personal narratives in which the individual’s sense of self is defined by his/her relation to collective social units or groupings” (90-91). Synecdoche, in this context, is a form of a dialogue between the self and its surroundings. Also, as, according to its definition, a memoir is “a mode of life narrative that situated the subject in a social environment, as either observer or participant . . . [and it] directs attention more toward the lives and actions of others than to the narrator” (Smith and Watson 274). Here Erdrich’s memoirs slightly depart from the definition. She, as a narrator and a protagonist, is very much present, engaged in self-analysis as well as participating in the lives of others. The terms “autobiography” and “memoir” are often employed as synonyms, but the distinction is significant, if at times too subtle to discern. In addition to the time frame these narratives tackle, autobiographies prioritize interiority of the author, whereas memoirs spotlight an author in relation and in dialogue to other people (Smith and Watson 274). The Blue Jay’s Dance is a “mixed-mode representation of self” (Castillo 91) consisting of memoir, autobiographical writing, essay-like chapters, and cooking recipes. The author’s self mirrors itself in the lives of other individuals (her husband, children, parents, and grandparents), as well as in activities, both intellectual, such as writing, and domestic, such as cooking, gardening, taking care of pets (Castillo 91). Castillo further argues the book is synecdochic “in its representation of Erdrich’s relationship to the landscapes of North Dakota and New Hampshire and to the larger community of women writers” (91). These dialogues between the individual and the land or another community reflect a collective dimension which can be characteristic of autobiographical writing by people from marginalized ethnic groups who thus establish a sense of belonging.

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This relatedness is also an attempt to make sense of her roles as a writer, a mother, a daughter, a granddaughter, a wife, and a human being. She describes her life in relation to people, groups, activities and phenomena. The relationships are concentric: Erdrich and her most immediate family and writing constitute the center, and her own and Dorris’ families, quotidian activities, animals and nature form circles within circles rippling with centrifugal forces. The book is a series of slices of life, reflecting the fragmentary nature of life, but also of memory and the “slicing” constitutes Erdrich’s very deliberate editing. Erdrich writes: “The baby described is a combination of our three babies whom I nursed and cared for in a series of writing offices” (BJD ix). This revelation proves Barthes right—writing about the self, is a narrative construct, subject to “editing, selection, and omission” (Castillo 89). She slices and pastes together, selects and edits into a whole. The title itself, The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Birth Year signals an innovation. Where one would insert “memoir,” Erdrich writes “a birth year,” which “emphasizes a relatively short time span her reflections apparently deal with and one definitely too short for an autobiography” (Skwarska 130). Thus, Erdrich prioritizes the seemingly inglorious, unheroic event of bearing children, but also, perhaps implicitly, of “giving birth” to books. In snippets we learn of her identities: mother, writer, wife, daughter, grand-daughter, gardener, cook, nature observer, reader, and a list-maker who creates catalogs of women writers and mothers, consciously inscribing herself into the continuum these lists build (Skwarska 137). She always defines herself in relation to others in order to establish context and continuity: revering the past, cherishing the present, and hopefully anticipating the future. Her roles are pieces of a puzzle forming a “who am I” entity, but “While all of them are true and identity-defining, none can alone serve to describe the writer’s self. And, no doubt, there are more roles that could become parts of this picture, making it even more complete” (Skwarska 137). The Blue Jay’s Dance records twelve months, or four seasons in the life of a mother, wife, and writer. Erdrich speaks of pregnancy in winter, when it is “time for telling stories” (McNab 34), blossoming motherhood in spring and summer, and taking up writing again in the fall (Ruoff 187), when the baby is more autonomous and Erdrich can stand to separate herself from it. The activities are inscribed into the natural calendar of seasons and mirror its logic.

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The memoir is an exercise in polyglossia, a series of different voices, that of a mother, of a writer, also a medley of sensual delights, and, according to Ruoff, a poignant and beautifully crafted book that combines deft insights into the interrelationship between mother and child, humankind’s links with the natural universe, and the act of writing. The recipes that punctuate the narrative emphasize the sensuality of experience . . . .In lyrical prose, Erdrich describes life cycles of the plants, birds, and animals on her New England farm. (187)

In this non-fiction book of ruminations on motherhood, writing, books, life and nature, Erdrich strongly asserts the nexus between being a writer and being a mother. She adds a disclaimer: “I am not a scientist, not a naturalist, not a chef, not an expert, not the best or worst mother, but a writer only, a woman constantly surprised” (BJD x). “Growing, bearing, mothering or fathering, supporting, and at last letting go of an infant is a powerful and mundane creative act that rapturously sucks up whole chunks of life” (BJD 3)—in that sense it is similar to writing, a creative act, also dependent on very down-to-earth routines and significant amounts of dedication and discipline. Sometimes being a mother overshadows every other role, but Erdrich is driven, determined. She corresponds with herself, to “keep the door to the other self—the writing self—open, I scratch messages on the envelopes of letters I can’t answer, in the margins of books I’m too tired to review. On pharmacy prescription bags, dime-store notebooks, children’s construction paper, I keep writing” (BJD 5). The creative inter—sects and is in dialogue with the domestic, they are a continuity, they mesh and it is impossible to draw a clear line between the two activities. Just as a mother usually cannot stop being a mother, a writer cannot stop being and thinking like a writer. Correspondence with the self becomes a compensation for the lack of dialogues expected of her: she has books to review, letters to answer. These creative, albeit rushed, fragmented and disorganized, scribbles recording the quotidian life, motivate and preserve the writing self. Her book becomes a dialogue between selves: “a set of thoughts from one self to the other—writer to parent, artist to mother” (BJD 5). No subject is too petty to write about and her identities, roles, voices merge in a polyphony, a unique symphony she conducts every day. Writing for her has an oxygen-like quality, is a necessity for “emotional and intellectual survival: it is who I am” (BJD 5). It must continue no matter what. “Writing is reflective and living is active—the two collide in the tumultuous business of caring for babies” (BJD 6). They

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collide but also can be combined in idiosyncratic ways, as Erdrich’s practice shows.

Conception To underscore the parallels between production and re—production, I am using the temporal sequence of biological processes while writing about producing books. Erdrich speaks of conception: “We conceive our children in deepest night, in blazing sun, outdoors, in barns and alleys and minivans. We have no rules, no ceremonies, we don’t even need a driver’s license” (BJD 3). Similarly, conceiving books can be a random activity irrespective of rules and routines, dependent on the mood or on inspiration. Whenever Erdrich is waiting for someone who is late, she is enjoying “the interstice:” “My brain shakes itself like an apple tree surprised by rain, and there, on my empty plate, an idea. I carry pens, paper” (BJD 84). As a writer, she is alert, prepared, ready to write when the muse strikes. Conceiving a book can be entirely accidental in seemingly inauspicious circumstances. There is no guarantee that the conceived idea will gestate into a novel, will not be a miscarriage, a false alarm.

Pregnancy/Gestation In her memoir Erdrich describes where she wrote at that time: in a little rental house across the road from their farmhouse in New Hampshire, where, in turn, her husband Michael Dorris also worked. She is aware of the history of the little house: a suicide, most probably, took place in the room where she writes. She cannot help but ponder “a subject grim as suicide while anticipating a child . . . but beginnings suggest endings and I can’t help thinking about the continuum, the span, the afters, and the befores” (BJD 8). This proves her cyclical thinking, her vision where everything inter—locks and the logic of continuity prevails. She is a part of the continuum, both by writing and by procreating. Also as a writer she creates new lives. She speaks of how writing and being pregnant correspond and how they differ: “I imagine myself somewhere else, into another skin, another person, another time. Yet simultaneously my body is constructing its own character. It requires no thought at all for me to form and fix a whole other person” (BJD 8). Gestating a baby is like contriving a book, although different skills and talents are at work. Her husband not only helped edit her novels, but also cooked and added the right ingredients to concoct a perfect creation: “Michael makes Jell-O for me so that the baby will have perfect

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fingernails. He attempts in his cooking, to get every part of the baby right” (BJD 13). Cooking, an activity traditionally attributed to women in Western society, but here mainly done by Dorris, is woven into the fabric of life and of the narrative. It is a nourishing and creative act performed by choice and for important reasons, given equal importance with other activities, professional or otherwise. Erdrich mitigates bouts of insomnia by writing poetry. She is a mother by day, poet by night: my work is hormone driven, inscribed in mother’s milk, pregnant with itself . . . I feel that I am transcribing verbatim from a flow of language running through the room, an ink current into which I dip the pen. It is a dark stream, swift running, a twisting flow that never doubles back. The amazement is that I need only to enter the room at those strange hours to be drawn back into the language. The frustration is that I cannot be there all the time. (BJD 24-25)

While writing novels theoretically requires patience and long, uninterrupted stretches of time, poetry-writing is a welcome remedy, a break, it can happen in the interstices. According to Erdrich, she “started out writing poems because I couldn’t sit still long enough for longer pieces of fiction” (BJD 70). She had to create bonds and ties, literally, to sit still: “I . . . tied myself into my chair . . . .A long scarf, knotted at the waist, allowed me to finish the first pieces of prose I’d ever done. Rewriting took a double knot” (BJD 70). Writing is reminiscent of raising babies, and the surprising knot is a future-oriented creativity: “The need to write and to reproduce are both all absorbing tasks that attempt to partake of the future” (BJD 79), Erdrich claims.

Labor/Birth Similarly to the births she has given, some fast, some peaceful, writing spells can be quick and painless or laborious. Both activities can include different tactics to facilitate the process. Still, Erdrich writes, “Even though I am a writer and have practiced my craft for years, and have experienced two natural childbirths and an epidural-assisted childbirth, I find women’s labor extremely difficult to describe” (BJD 42). “In the first place, there are all sorts of labor and no ‘correct’ way to do it” (BJD 42) which can also be true of the writing process, a very idiosyncratic practice. In an ingenious passage which could be applicable both to giving birth and to writing, she says: “Some push once, some don’t push at all, some push

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in pleasure, some not and some, like me, for hours” (BJD 47). Some write in a flow, some in bursts, some toil for hours. Erdrich claims that “every birth is a story” (BJD 43), it is unique and marks a beginning of a new life. Once again she strengthens the knot: A mother or a father, in describing their labor, relates the personality of the child to some piece of the event, makes the story into a frame, an introduction, a prelude to the child’s life, molds the labor into the story that is no longer a woman’s story or a man’s story, but the story of a child. (BJD 45)

A birth is made into a preface in the book of life of a particular baby, a new tale. Thus we not only re—produce, but most of all we produce when having babies. It is a creative act and can be likened to writing, as the identities and activities of mothers and writers share commonalities.

Caring It seems that caring can get in the way of writing and drain creative juices. But Erdrich is not bitter about it, she accepts this fact even though one can sense a longing for time to write. Parenting is absorbing and wins over every other activity: “I confess that, in deep love, I want her, I choose her. I adore the privilege of our babies’ constant care even though to write a paragraph requires long preparation” (BJD 55-56). Caring and writing are competing for her attention. It is an unequal feud, as maternal instinct always wins, the only solution being “In order to write, I have to plan ahead” (BJD 56) for “there is rarely a moment to think of anything else besides that infant’s needs” (BJD 56). Occasionally both activities are performed simultaneously, linked and “held” together, in a dialogue: “I hold my child in one arm, nursing her, and write with the other hand. With no separation of thought and physical being, there are times I live within a perfect circle” (BJD 113). This “perfect circle,” a continuum of caring and writing, living and thinking, is a rare phenomenon, it is interrupted by “the other times. Months go by and with the end of spring the dim realization surfaces—I cannot concentrate on one thought, one idea” (BJD 113). Most of the time the dialogue cannot take place. The activities remain separate, or one colonizes the other. Sometimes she writes when unable to sleep, sometimes she wakes up to an idea. But when caring for a baby, priorities can shift, the invisible cord transmits other messages:

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For nights, I wake, startled, my brain humming with abysmal exhaustion, aware only in the most atavistic way that something is wrong. It is as if in sleep I have been cut in two and suddenly I miss my other half. I am there at her cry and in the deepest hour of the night we fit together again like the pieces of a broken locket. (BJD 152)

The baby and its wellbeing becomes the protagonist of Erdrich’s nights and days. Most of the time caring for a baby determines her actions and thoughts. The pages in her novels remain blank, writing hovers only on the margins, in a stand-by mode, waiting to be brought back to the surface. The dialogue between the two activities is sometimes barely there, but it only attests to the fact that the dialogic practice does not always embody pure harmony, nor is it equally reciprocal.

Continuity and Natural Universe Accompanying the above mentioned stages are Erdrich’s keen observations and insights on what is happening around her, as absorbing as motherhood can be. In Paper Trail, Dorris dubbed her memoir “a series of nature essays” (368) and her book explores the inter—play between culture and nature reflecting her interest in the environment surrounding her. Patterns of continuance are everywhere and she writes about the landscape, the weather, the seasons, about her cats and dogs, behaviors of animals she witnesses directly or from the window in her writing office. She watches birds coming to the birdfeeder. She lists some of the recipes for her favorite foods, but she says she “wanted to revise The Blue Jay’s Dance. For one thing, I wanted to take out the recipes. Don’t try the lemonmeringue pie, it doesn’t work. I’ve received letters” (Halliday 2010). She not only employs garden metaphors (“compost pile”), but is a gardener herself, creating a dialogue between the speaking/theorizing and the active self. She plans a garden as she muses on the gardens of her family members, her ancestors, on literal and metaphorical roots: “It is not only the actual planting of gardens, but the activity of planning them in the dead of winter, of leafing through seed catalogues and creating gardens of the mind, that provides Erdrich with a sense of self, of rootedness” (Castillo 92). She sketches a mental family tree. She places her life in the context of other lives, be they the lives of her family members, ancestors, neighbors, or of animals in her proximity. Thus she draws a circle, attempts a dialogue with life’s manifestations.

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Weaning and Cutting the Cord vs. Re—cycling Protagonists and Re—writing Novels As a mother, she prepares for and experiences the inevitable letting go, the loosening of the bonds: With each celebration of maturity there is also a pang of loss. This is our human problem, one common to parents, sons and daughters, too—how to let go while holding tight, how to simultaneously cherish the closeness and intricacy of the bond while at the same time letting out the raveling string, the red yarn that ties our hearts. (BJD 69)

It is a complex process of weaning for both parties involved, loss playing a major role: “As our baby grows more into her own life, so I recover mine, but it is an ambiguous blessing. With one hand I drag the pen across the page and with the other, the other hand, I cannot let go of hers” (BJD 214). As Erdrich resumes writing on a more regular basis, she encounters a moment of “ambiguous blessing,” of mixed emotions, of straddling: “I will turn to her and lay aside this story, but with loss. I will play with her but part of me won’t be there. Conflict has entered our perfect circle in a new set of clothes, and I’m torn between wanting to be with her always and needing to be—through writing and through concentration—who I am” (BJD 215). This is an example of problematic dialogue between these two activities. A sense of guilt is creeping in, a chasm emerges between wanting to be one with the baby and wanting to separate one’s self. When the process of weaning commences, Erdrich has more time to write and is shocked into new solitude: “The hours stretch wide on the mornings I work alone. Time expands in a blue haze. I am lighter, fuller, ballooning with stunned surprise” (BJD 217). This memoir portrays pregnancy, motherhood, and a subsequent return to writing: “I am ready now to finish this book of scraps, of jottings, of notes and devotions taken at another time, another era in our lives” (BJD 218). As a writer she is supposed to “let go” of her characters, to write each new book with new protagonists, but she does not. She says: “as something is being finished, you feel this mixture of can’t let it go and glory because it’s beautiful” (Wong, “An Interview” 51). She re—cycles protagonists, places, events as if to cushion the inevitable loss, to delay the inevitable. In dialogue with her own experience, she places many different instances of parenthood in her novels.

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Mothers in the Novels A whole plethora of mothers—good, moderate, inadequate, and confused—is portrayed in Erdrich’s novels. June is said to have had “no patience with children. She wasn’t much as a mother; everyone in the family said so” (LM 2009, 8). Zelda Kashpaw says to June’s son, Lipsha: ”No mother, she was sure no true mother. June Morrisey, Kashpaw, whatever she was, she threw you in” (BP 49). Her son lives convinced that Marie Kashpaw saved him from his mother “who wanted to tie me in a potato sack and throw me in a slough” (LM 2009, 226). June also leaves her son King: “She always planned that she would make it somewhere else first, then send for the boy” (LM 2009, 9). Children are abandoned and also unofficially adopted on a regular basis in Love Medicine and other novels by Erdrich. As Erdrich put it: “Abandonment is in all the books: the terror of having a bad mother or being a bad mother, or just a neglectful mother” (Halliday 2010). June was raised by her uncle Eli, “like his own daughter when her mother passed away and nobody else would take her” (LM 2009, 23). One of the most troubled cases of parenting, or a perverted version thereof, is the relationship between Sister Leopolda and her daughter Marie Lazarre as described in Love Medicine and Tracks. It is not entirely clear whether Marie knows of their secret kinship and “the reader cannot fully appreciate the significance of Marie’s relationship with Leopolda without the information revealed in Tracks” (Bennett, “A Review of Love Medicine” 117). The readers’ pleasure will be enhanced by reading all of the books in the series (Bennett, “A Review of Love Medicine” 115), because they will fill in the blanks while reading and will be surprized on many an occasion. The two novels are dialogical with regard to the complex mother-daughter relationship. The pregnancy was traumatic: “as it grew, as she grew, she punched with her powerful head and rolled and twisted like an otter. When she did this, the fits of hate took me so hard that I wept, dug my sharp fingernails into the wood of the table” (T 133). Pauline Puyat tried to abort her child. After Marie is born, Pauline cannot bear to hold her, shows no trace of maternal instinct: I looked upon her. She was soiled, formed by me, bearing every defilement I had known by Napoleon Morissey. The spoons had left a dark bruise on both temples. “Look,” I said. “She’s marked by the devil’s thumbs.” “No, she’s not,” said Bernadette. “Take her. Put her to your breast.” But the child was already fallen, a dark thing, and I could not bear the thought. I turned away.

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Years later, Marie wants to become a nun. She is subjected to masochistic behavior coming from the fanatic nun Leopolda (her biological mother) who even stabs her hand and does not protest when Marie claims it is stigmata, and thus covers her crime. The relation between Fleur Pillager and Lulu Nanapush is another complicated mother-daughter relationship, as Fleur abandons Lulu on more than one occasion. Lulu cannot forgive or forget. Lulu is raised by her uncle Nanapush. She hears her mother’s voice as if keeping her from harm, but this long-distance relationship is never a close one, Fleur is never there when Lulu needs her, for example while giving birth: “I needed a midwife to guide me, a mother” (LM 2009, 83). Marie (Lazarre) Kashpaw takes in children, in addition to raising her own, she is the mother of “All the blood children and the took-ins” (LM 2009, 249), she adopts June “So I took the girl. It wasn’t long before I would want to hold her against me tighter than any of the others” (LM 2009, 86). Marie offers maternal love, but June is scarred for life, since as a little girl she was violated by her mother’s boyfriend and cannot receive love for fear of it being revoked. A powerful bond occurs between Marie and her mother-in-law Margaret Rushes Bear. Margaret initially antagonizes her daughter-in-law, but after Marie lets her live with them and Margaret helps deliver Marie’s child in a life-threatening labor, she claims Marie as her daughter. Marie says: “I never saw this woman the same way I had before the day. Before the birth of the child . . . Rushes Bear was a hot fire that I wanted to crush. After that, things were different. I never saw her without knowing that she was my own mother, my own blood. What she did went beyond the frailer connections” (LM 2009, 101). The experience of motherhood brings the two competing and hostile women closer, a strong bond aside from blood connections is established. Erdrich’s novels are brimful with examples of fractured families. In her writing she often attempts to patch them up, to restore families by creating new ones, to fix what can be repaired. Mary, Karl, the baby and Adelaide Adare of The Beet Queen go to a fair, ironically dubbed “The Orphans’ Picnic,” where Adelaide abandons her children by flying off with her next lover, an aviator. Mary and Karl are manipulated into giving away the baby to a man who claims he “wanted to take the baby back to his wife so she could feed him. She had a newborn of her own, he said, and enough milk for two” (BQ 13). Before her spectacular escape, Adelaide was trying

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to make ends meet, despite the hard times and Depression. In a moment of desperation she considers hurting her newborn baby: “I should let it die . . . I could bury it out back in the lot” . . . . “Mama, wake up,” I said, but she kept speaking. “I won’t have any milk. I’m too thin.” I looked down at the baby. His face was round, bruised blue, and his eyelids were swollen almost shut. He looked frail, but when he stirred I put my little finger in his mouth, as I had seen women do to quiet their babies, and his suck was eager. “He’s hungry,” I told her. But Adelaide rolled over and turned her face to the wall. (BQ 9)

She neglects the baby, neglects her other children, and refuses to sell her jewelry to pay the bills. Later when Mary goes to live with her mother’s sister Fritzie, she tells her new friend Celestine that her parents are both dead and once when a postcard from her mother comes asking about the children, Mary writes back in a cruelly vengeful, unforgiving gesture: “All three of your children starved dead” (BQ 58). Mothers come and go, some stay, some abandon their children, some adopt other people’s children in Erdrich’s novels. Her novels do not say there is one universal experience of motherhood, but portray a spectrum of possible behaviors.

Unconventional Parenthood in the Novels Biological parents are a frequent subject in Erdrich’s novels, but so are adopted children and their volunteer parents. Flavin asserts that in The Beet Queen, and other books by Erdrich, “new structures of human relationships are formed to replace traditional ones” (Flavin 17). Pete and Fritzie adopt Mary. Mary and Celestine become friends and also family as they work and live together and are parents to Dot, Celestine and Karl’s daughter. Wallace, Karl’s lover, also becomes a parent to Dot. Similarly to Nanapush giving his name to Lulu, Wallace “As her male sponsor . . . was glad to give her full name for the church records” (BQ 172). Celestine, Mary and Wallace are parents to Dot, but a complicated triangle of parents, spoiling her, succumbing to her whims, at her every beck and call, allowing her to grow up head-strong, occasionally manipulative, and cruel. Celestine says: “I try to be the mother that I never had, to the daughter I never was” (BQ 215), thus committing a mistake common to mothers who had an unhappy childhood and want to make up with abundance and forgive everything uncritically. When Dot runs away from home she plans

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to live with her father Karl, who comes and goes as he pleases, and occasionally sends Dot bizarre presents, e.g. an electric wheel chair. Although not a biological parent to Dot, Wallace muses insightfully on the difficult lessons of parenting: “You fail sometimes. No matter how much you love your children, there are times you slip. There are moments you stutter, can’t give, lose your temper, or simply lose face with the world, and you can’t explain this to a child” (BQ 236). Being a child can be an equally failure-fraught experience. Once, Dot does something she soon regrets and grows to appreciate her mother as she sees her waiting: “In her eyes I see the force of her love. It is bulky and hard to carry, like a package that keeps untying . . . .It is embarrassing. I walk to her, drawn by her, unable to help myself” (BQ 337). Love is a messy, complicated feeling and Dot is on the verge of cracking open “I want to lean into her the way wheat leans into wind, but instead I walk upstairs and lie down in my bed alone” (BQ 338). Eventually though, both of them lie in their beds, eyes open, waiting for each other’s initiative. No resolution follows and that is how the novel ends. Parent-child relationships are sometimes too complex and too fraught with hidden conflicts for communication and resolution to take place, and Erdrich is not afraid of presenting these experiences non-judgmentally and in dialogue with other, more positive ones, offering diversity instead of exclusion.

Fatherhood in the Novels: Father’s Milk Fathers play important roles in Erdrich’s novels. The author flips the scenario and equips a man with maternal instincts in The Antelope Wife. A dog and a soldier make an escape from a raided village. A baby is strapped to the dog’s back, and the soldier is surprised into taking care of her: “he was able at last to remove the child from its wrappings and bathe it, a girl, and to hold her. He’d never done such a thing before” (AW 1998, 5). He tries to feed her rabbit, then water. What follows is a description of a man not knowing he is preparing to substitute for a mother: Perplexed at what to feed her, then alarmed when, after a night of deprivation, her tiny face crumpled in need. She peered at him in expectation and, at last, violently squalled. Her cries filled a vastness that nothing else could. They resounded, took over everything, and brought his heart clean to the surface. Scranton Roy cradled the baby, sang lewd camp tunes, then stalwart hymns, and at last remembered his own mother’s lullabies. Nothing helped. It seemed, when he held her close upon his heart as women did, that the child grew angry with longing and desperately clung, rooted with its mouth, roared in frustration, until at last, moved to

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near insanity, Roy opened his shirt and put her to his nipple. She seized him. Inhaled him. Her suck was fierce. His whole body was astonished, most of all the inoffensive nipple he’d never noticed or appreciated until, in spite of the pain, it served to gain him peace. As he sat there, the child holding part of him in its mouth, he looked around just in case there should be any witness to this act which seemed to him strange as anything that had happened in this sky-filled land . . . .So the evening passed and then the night. Scranton Roy was obliged to change nipples, the first one hurt so, and he fell asleep with the baby tucked beside him on his useless teat. (AW 1998, 6)

The helplessness of the situation calls for maternal (paternal?) instincts exasperated Scranton Roy starts exhibiting. He acts as a mother would and successfully appeases the baby’s needs. In a series of ingenious attempts, he smears the grease of a partridge on his nipples to lessen the pain, only to find out that it “made her wild for him“ (AW 1998, 6). After killing a buffalo bull, cooking its tongue, and chewing it, he tries to feed it to the baby, but “She still much preferred him. As he was now past civilized judgment, her loyalty filled him with a foolish, tender joy. . . The baby continued to nurse and he made a sling for her from his shirt” (AW 1998, 7). Is the “God-given milk” (AW 1998, 8) a miracle? It is certainly a trans—formation necessitated by the circumstances. This involuntary fatherhood stuns and delights him, awakening instincts he did not realize existed: “He is a man, though he nourished her” (AW 1998, 11). Years later, “When he rocks her, Matilda Roy remembers the taste of his milk—hot and bitter as dandelion juice” (AW 1998, 10). His milk was not sweet like a mother’s is, but life-sustaining nevertheless. Erdrich describes experiences of motherhood and related occurrences, e.g. labor. Descriptions of difficult births also abound in her novels. While witnessing his wife’s labor Scranton Roy is astounded, looking “with tender horror at the pains of his own mother, and of all mothers, and of the unfair limitations of our bodies, of the hopeless settlement of our life tasks” (AW 1998, 17). Experience has taught him empathy and sympathy with mothers while he breastfed, and now perhaps he felt a pang, thinking what it would feel like if men could give birth, if the tasks related to parenthood were equally distributed. When Scranton’s wife passes away he is breastfeeding again, again defying “the hopeless settlement of our life tasks.” Erdrich, when musing on women and men as writers, detects in poetry written by men, e.g. Frost, Blake or Keats “the yearning—the mystery of an epiphany, the sense of oceanic oneness, the great yes, the wholeness” (BJD 148). This could be interpreted as men’s yearning for the impossible:

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to be biological mothers to their children in defiance of nature’s ways. She argues that “Perhaps we owe some of our most moving literature to men who didn’t understand that they wanted to be women nursing babies” (BJD 148). Scranton’s story is another exorcism in history and life patterns, as Stirrup posits: As a male soldier involved in the suppression of Native unrest, Roy is emblematic of colonial and patriarchal control and yet in one sequence of events—the matricide, the rescue of the girl, and his reconfiguration as maternal, nurturing force—he exposes the inadequacy of those conventional knowledge structures. (119)

The masculine and the feminine performances are placed in an uneasy dialogue in this context, yet the tension proves fruitful, for the reader is asked to question the viability of tasks distributed according to biological determinants. In The Beet Queen Wallace Pfeff, in a surprisingly expert manner, helps Celestine James to deliver her baby: “Get sheets,” she said, before the next contraction. I ran from the room and collected fresh towels, an ice pack, a first-aid kit. I removed brand new sheets from their wrappings and brought all of this back to her, dumped everything beside the couch. She nodded briefly. So I continued, encouraged, to collect things. I boiled water, sterilized my best pair of shears. I made a bed for the baby in a laundry basket. I warmed up washcloths and wrung out hot towels to wipe Celestine’s face. All this time she was working at this, tensing and rocking, sometimes kneeling beside the couch and sometimes on it . . . I was fishing a hot washrag out of a pot when Celestine wailed loudly. “Gawd! Gawd! Gawd!” Three times, like someone in the throes of love or giving up their soul. I ran into the living room and steadied myself at Celestine’s elbow. “I felt the head!” she gasped. “Just for a minute. It went back.” There was something in the moment that calmed me then . . . There was something in her expression that gave me strength too. I knelt at the other end of the couch and held her legs. She closed her eyes and instead of the whooping sound she made a kind of low whine. It didn’t sound to me like pain though, just effort. She roared when the head came. Then she pushed down again and held herself, pushing down, for a long time. The sound she made was a deeper one, of vast relief, and the baby slid into my hands. (BQ 1170-71)

Wallace not only follows the instruction while assisting, but also his intuition, shows initiative and assembles all the necessary utensils,

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although he received no training in that field. He is considerate of the woman giving birth and of the baby about to be born. He is not scared, on the contrary he remains peaceful and ready for the baby to arrive. According to Cooperman, Nanapush, as portrayed in Tracks especially, also exhibits instincts usually attributed to mothers: “Nanapush was in some ways the book’s most maternal character. He wondered wistfully how it feels to be a woman, tended Fleur, advised Eli, brooded over Lulu’s delivery, agreed to rear her, and gave her long monologues of advice” (Cooperman 72). He is the father- and mother-figure to: Fleur, motherless Lulu, and orphaned Pauline. Men are very often equipped with agency when it comes to taking care of children in Erdrich’s novels. Dorris believed in equality, defied the “hopeless settlement of our life tasks” and as a single parent he believed the key “to juggle family and career was organization and good intent. I was aggressively confident, well versed in the literature and jargon of child rearing and prepared to quote statistics to prove that nurturing was a human and not exclusively female, potential” (The Broken Cord 66). He also recorded his experiences in dialogue with his wife’s memoir. .

Michael Dorris’ Autobiographical Writing and Activism The essays in Paper Trail (1994) portray Dorris in relation to different communities: as a teacher, as a book reader, a traveler, a writer, a socially engaged scholar of anthropology. His autobiographical essays differ from Erdrich’s memoirs insofar as they were initially published separately in periodicals before being collected as a book. He then collected this “paper trail” into a book and organized the essays thematically. The personal is inter—woven with the political, themes range from family issues, travel experiences, book reading, buying a house, to Native American identity and politics. His memoir The Broken Cord elaborates on these themes but foregrounds his experience of fatherhood to children in various stages of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS). Adrienne Rich argued that “to ‘father’ a child suggests above all to beget, to provide the sperm which fertilizes the ovum. To ‘mother’ a child implies a continuing presence, lasting at least nine months, more often for years” (Rich 12), but his experience proves that also fathers know how to be an ongoing presence in the lives of their children. The Broken Cord (1989) concerns FAS, which his son suffered from, and it was written for political reasons: “it is a book that hopes to effect change” (Brainard 137). FAS affects the infants of women who consume alcohol during pregnancy. It can result in severe impairments, educational,

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social, and personal. Erdrich and Dorris were beginning a public dialogue about FAS and “advocating measures in various state legislatures to label liquor bottles with warnings to pregnant mothers” (Trueheart 120) in order to trigger a change in the public discourse. Dorris dedicated the book to his son and to Erdrich: “For Louise/who shares this story/who joined me in its living and telling/who made us whole” (The Broken Cord v). Dorris’ account of their family life is different from Erdrich’s in The Blue Jay’s Dance. With his son Abel’s and his wife’s consent, Dorris divulges much of the painful truth about raising a FAS child. The Broken Cord is dialogical: it commences with Erdrich’s foreword, continues with Dorris’ autobiographical tale, and ends with Abel’s fifteen-page account (preserving his mistakes). It tells a story of one boy, of one family in order to personalize the statistics. It comes as a warning to future and present mothers to entirely abstain from alcohol during pregnancy. In the foreword, Erdrich, with heartbreaking candor, writes about her experiences of being a mom to Abel. She recalls losing patience with him, and, after he refuses to eat and she knows he will have a seizure the next day because of that, she cries out in desperation “don’t call me Mom!” (“Foreword” xv). Even though he forgets most things, he does not forget that. Erdrich and Dorris speak of deeply frustrated parenthood, of overwhelming helplessness in confrontation with their son’s illness and their repeated efforts having absolutely no positive effect. Erdrich contributed to this book but her activism is soft, not polemical, not aggressive. She believes the issue can be eradicated “through enlightenment, through education and a new commitment to treatment. That is the hope in which this book was written” (“Foreword” xx). By co—authoring The Broken Cord, Dorris and Erdrich lent their voices to a political cause, present not only among the Native American community. They started a public debate pointing to the problem of FAS children on reservations. Theirs was a literary, but also a socially and politically engaged partnership. They believed in sharing responsibilities and the The Crown of Columbus, which they co—authored, subscribes to that stance.

The Crown of Columbus by Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich: Joint Writing, Joint Parenthhood The writers shared parenthood and writing, they swapped tasks as they saw fit. Erdrich credits her husband “We raised our children as equally as we could, responding to an ever changing and complex variety of ages and

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needs” (BJD x). The Crown of Columbus continues that logic. It was the first formal joint by-line novel by Dorris and Erdrich and although they did not say it was autobiographical, it addresses a subject which reverberated in the authors’ lives very strongly. By trial and error the protagonists Vivian and Roger, both academics, are trying to figure out if the parenting can be shared as their personalities vary greatly and differences appear to be irreconcilable. The father of her first-born son deserted: “By the end of the third month, his father . . . literally run out of steam. That was when he had decided to become an emissary of goodwill, had traveled with an international treaty organization to Geneva and never come back” (CC 93). Roger, initially, also seems to be evading fatherhood, partly due to his own helplessness in view of the tasks ahead. He says “I know I should be more mature about this, do my part. If I were biologically equipped . . . .” (CC 225). His wishful thinking echoes the rarely articulated wish of a father to be like the mother, to challenge “the hopeless settlement of our life tasks,” but it also sounds like an excuse not to be a good father, because he cannot be a mother. Vivian watches him with sympathy: “His body was firm and complete, incapable of doubling, of incubating, not to mention providing nourishment, while here I was, pure sustenance. I felt rich, wonderfully extended into this tiny being. I was, in fact more than just Vivian. I was goddess! And poor Roger was mere mortal” (CC 225). When he is working intellectually, he demands absolute peace “When I am engaged at the keyboard . . . there must be no interruptions” (CC 228), he says but she is enraged as she will not settle into “the benign stereotype of family life . . . domestic little woman, man at his machine, wrestling with work” (CC 227). Infuriated, she retorts From now on there will be plenty of interruptions. There will be cries of hunger and thirst. There will be demands to be entertained. When Violet is older, there will be questions, and you’ll answer them. If you’re sitting at the computer, you’ll remove your hands from the keyboard. If you’re writing with your fancy pen—if she hasn’t flushed it down the toilet by then—you’ll screw on the top and set it down. If you’re having a thought, you’ll put it on hold or forget it. You’re a father, Roger. Get used to it. (CC 228)

A father’s role in a baby’s life is not merely ornamental. It requires participation regardless of other activities, be they intellectual or domestic. Ideally, fatherhood, just like motherhood, is a round-the-clock job, or more of a vocation, for not every one is cut out for the role. Once, when left alone with the baby, Roger, like Scranton Roy in The Antelope Wife, acts intuitively:

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Chapter IV Into the dark O of her puckered mouth I plugged the tip of my little finger. She blinked, contemplated further protest, was tempted to explore the strange intrusion with her tongue, applied tentative suction—and, miracle of miracles, she discovered it to be to her liking. A new flavor, a bit dry perhaps, but amusing, not overpowering in its aroma yet hearty all the same. Emboldened by success, but never withdrawing my digit, I leaned forward and cupped her body in the bough of my free arm. Carefully I drew her toward me until at last I had scooped her from bed, blankets and all. When I rose, she rose with me, cradled and preoccupied, her mouth busy with my finger as she tried to locate the button that would release its novel flow. (CC 237)

Roger appeases a hungry baby with his finger, but she cannot be fooled and awaits the flow of milk. This appeasement is temporary, for the “hopeless settlement of our tasks” determines the situation and only her mother’s milk can assuage the baby’s need. Roger accepts his new role and the ending of the novel is optimistic: two career-oriented parents can learn to share child-rearing tasks. In a similar manner, Lipsha, in The Bingo Palace, having realized he and his father stole a car with a baby in it, intuits what to do when trapped in a snowstorm: Come what might when we are found, I stay curled around this baby. The heater snaps off, the motor dies down. I rummage in the seat for whatever I can find to keep us warm and find small blankets, baby size. I know it will be a long night that maybe will not end. But at least I can say, as I drift, as the cold begins to take me, as I pull the baby closer to me, zipping him inside of my jacket, here is one child who was never left behind. I bite my own hands like the dog, but already they are numb. The shooting star is in my mouth, cold fire blazing into nothing, but at least this baby never was alone. At least he had someone, even if it was just a no-account like me. (BP 259)

Lipsha, abandoned by June and adopted by Marie, knows what it feels like to be unwanted, left behind. He is a young adult without a plan for life, but already knows what a father instinctively would do in a situation when a baby’s life is in danger. Both men and women are presented as capable or incapable of being parents in Erdrich’s novels, it is a ruthlessly fair parity.

Other Mothers and Fathers Writing Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon, who are married to each other, both wrote books about motherhood and fatherhood in what seems to be a

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rare gesture of shared parenthood among writers, even more unique for being recorded and published. In Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace, an honest account of motherhood and the many difficult decisions it entails, Waldman offers a scathing analysis of what it means to be a good vs. bad mother. Many people resort to hyperbole and superhero imagery while defining a good mother, who juggles multiple roles and priorities with only two hands. Whereas when Waldman polls her friends on what it means to be a good father, the simple word “presence” prevails (9). Mothers are expected to be superheroes, while fathers just have to “be.” Dorris and Chabon were more than present as fathers. Mothers engage in a mission impossible unless more tasks are delegated to fathers: The single defining characteristic of iconic Good Motherhood is selfabnegation. Her children’s needs come first; their health and happiness are her primary concern. They occupy all her thoughts, her day is constructed around them, and anything and everything she does is for their sakes. Her own needs, ambitions, and desires are relevant only in relation to theirs. If a Good Mother takes care of herself, it is only to the extent that she doesn’t hurt her children. (Waldman 10)

Having been told by a stranger while shopping with his baby in a supermarket that he is a good dad, Chabon concludes, annoyed at the unfairness of this statement in relation to any mother, that “In a grocery store, no mother is good or bad; she is just a mother, shopping for her family” (Chabon 12). Waldman gave up a successful career as a lawyer to raise her children, but found out she needed to work to remain sane. To balance the repetition of caring for babies she turned to writing. There are no signs of literary competition between her and Chabon. But, also in her case, writing competed with caring and the sense of deprivation was overwhelming: When the children were very young, I found it difficult to write. Each time I told myself it would be different, but with every child, for the first four months, I would accomplish nothing. Even after I could return to work, I worked on baby time, stopping to nurse, to bandage wounds both real and imaginary, losing days to their sleepless nights. I find myself relieved that that time is drawing to a close. They need me as much as ever, but the way they need me is different; it’s as intense, but it’s not diffused over every hour of the day. They are gone at school all day, and with a certain amount of discipline I can devote that time to my work. I realize that I don’t want to go back to squeezing my writing into the cracks my children leave in the day and in my concentration. (Waldman 182)

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In that passage, Waldman speaks very honestly of her sense of dissonance. Erdrich was more diplomatic when she was tackling a similar topic. Like Erdrich and Dorris, Waldman and Chabon, parents of four children, share household and child-care duties and are very articulate about it. Echoing Erdrich and Dorris’ assertions, Chabon muses on the “monumental open-endedness of the job” (14): Being a father is an unlimited obligation, one that even the best of us with the least demanding of children, could never hope to fulfill entirely. Children’s thirst for their fathers can never be slaked, no matter how bottomless and brimming the vessel. I have abandoned my children a thousand times, failed them, left their care and comfort to others, wandered in by telephone or e-mail from the void of a life on the road, issued arbitrary and contradictory commands from my mountaintop when all that was wanted was a place on my lap, absented myself from their bedtime routine on a night when they needed me more than usual, forestalled, deferred, or neglected their needs in the name of something I told myself merited the sacrifice. (46)

Parenthood as a project is a challenge, for one can fail in so many ways: Chabon’s list is not exhaustive by any means. To combine it with writing which in almost every case demands enormous discipline and dedication deserves much respect.

Lists of Literary (Fore)Mothers Not only interested in a dialogue between mothers and fathers, in The Blue Jay’s Dance Erdrich meditates on the nexus of being a woman, a mother and a writer. In order to establish correlation and continuity, a tradition of mother-writers, she makes lists: Every female writer starts out with a list of other female writers in her head. Mine includes, quite pointedly, a mother list. I collect these women in my heart and often shuffle through the little I know of their experiences to find the toughness of spirit to deal with mine. (BJD 144)

Every woman has a different story. Some intentionally did not become mothers, some could not. Childless writers include, for example, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dorothy Parker. The list of mother-writers is longer, however, and remains an inspiration, as it is a list of women who succeeded despite of or because of being a mother: George Sand, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Anna Akhmatova, Toni Morrison, Anne Sexton, Adrienne

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Rich, Alice Walker, Alice Munro, Joan Didion, Isabel Allende, Linda Hogan, Jane Smiley, and Louise Glück. Being in a company of such accomplished writers might provide support and inspiration in darker, less auspicious moments of being a mother in addition to being a writer, or being a mother instead of being a writer. The list provides a context, a literary tradition for Erdrich, creates a sense of community, dialogue, and shared purpose.

Fellow Writer, Fellow Mother: Elif Shafak In addition to Erdrich and Waldman, Elif Shafak is another poignant example of a mother and an author who writes with candor about the compromises parenthood has taught her. Shafak, an accomplished writer of complicated provenance, has recently penned Black Milk: On Writing, Motherhood, and the Harem Within (BM). She dwells eloquently on what it means to add the role of the mother to the existing roles of: a writer, nomad, cosmopolite, lover of Sufism, pacifist, vegetarian, woman; and how to tame the harem, for “The Sufis believe that every human being is a mirror that reflects the universe at large. They say each of us is a walking microcosm. To be human, therefore, means to live with an orchestra of conflicting voices and mixed emotions” (BM xii). The Sufi belief rings similar to the dialogic principle of heteroglossia where multiple voices co—exist, sometimes in a harmony, more often in a cacophony. Shafak, much like Adrienne Rich in her Of Woman Born, demystifies the experience of maternity and refuses to view it in positive terms only. When trying to figure out how to remain a writer while being a mother, Shafak too makes lists of women writers with children, echoing Erdrich’s gesture, and seeks role models and motivation. Her catalog of writing mothers includes, for example, Nadine Gordimer, Margaret Atwood, Annie Proulx, Jhumpa Lahiri, J.K. Rowling, Sylvia Plath, Susan Sontag, Barbara Kingsolver, Marguerite Duras, and Alice Walker.

Books as Babies Shafak, like Erdrich, asserts the bond between the experiences of having a baby and of writing a book: “Likening children to books is not a common metaphor in the world of literature, but likening books to children surely is,” she writes (BM 203). She claims that “it is always female writers who employ this metaphor. I have never heard of a male writer regarding his novels as his children” (BM 203). Dorris, an exception, asked whether one book is more important than another, responded that: “No, not any more

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than I feel that one of my kids is more important than another” (Chavkin and Feyl Chavkin, “An Interview with Michael Dorris” 204). In Paper Trail he remarked: “It’s no accident that whatever Louise and I write, whether fiction or nonfiction, there always seems to be a baby getting born and being cared for. When you’re typing with one hand while aiming a bottle of juice at an open mouth with the other, you take your inspiration where you find it” (44). This perhaps accounts for the pervasive presence of parent-children relationships in all stages in the novels by Erdrich and Dorris. Shafak makes a distinction between babies and books based on the amount of “maintenance” they demand: As widely held as the metaphor might appear, there is one crucial difference between babies and books that should not go unnoticed. Human babies are quite exceptional in the amount and intensity of care that they require . . . .Books, however, aren’t like that. They can stand on their own feet starting from birth . . . and they can instantly swim . . . from the warm sands of publishing houses toward the vast, blue waters of readers. (BM 203)

In this honest autobiographical take on her life as a woman intensely propelled by writing, Shafak speaks of depression and mind-numbing inability to find joy and fulfillment at the outset of motherhood. Similarly Erdrich is honest while writing about the exhaustion, although Castillo sings high praises about “the ways in which she manages successfully to juggle contrasting and sometimes conflicting ethnic, family and professional roles” (95). It takes enormous effort and ruthless self-analysis for Shafak to start enjoying motherhood and to reconcile all the identities she has carved out for herself.

Late Motherhood in Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country At the age of forty-seven Erdrich was pregnant with her fourth daughter. In her second memoir Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country (BIOC) she muses on late motherhood, but also on travels and particularly the bookisland on Rainy Lake in Canada hosting “thousands of rare books ranging from crumbling copies of Erasmus in the French and Heloise letters to Abelard dated MDCCXXIII, to first editions of Mark Twain (signed) to a magnificent collection of ethnographic works on the Ojibwe” (BIOC 3). The book-island, with more than 11,000 books, established by Ernest “Ober” Oberholzer, “a close friend to the Ojibwe” (BIOC 103), serves occasionally as a retreat for “teachers and serious students of the language,

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as well as one or two Ojibwe writers” (BIOC 103). She visits the island whenever she can. She sprinkles her book with geography, ethnography, linguistics (Ojibwe), history, drawings (e.g. of a map), stories about her ancestors, tales of daily life of a mother to four girls, thus, again in a synecdochic gesture, weaving a rich context for her experiences as a mother, writer, reader, and traveler no less. Many entries describe Ojibwe customs, rituals, beliefs and talk of Tobasonakwut, Erdrich’s new partner, her baby daughter’s father, a sun dancer and a healer. She also describes meetings with people, mostly Ojibwes: family, friends, and professionals. Books and Islands opens very appropriately to a map of Ojibwe Country. Erdrich is a literary cartographer; aside from the actual map, she narrates her own route, recording her observations, flora and fauna, people she encounters, books she “meets.” Words become the marks she leaves, tracks documenting her journey. Maps represent geography and spatial orientation. Although Jacobs claims the book belongs to the “travel writing genre” (Jacobs, “Part One: Materials” 16), I would argue that this memoir consists of poignant insights on late motherhood, equally important to tales of travels and books. According to Stirrup, The Blue Jay’s Dance also spotlights a trip, not topographical but of mind and body: “of pregnancy, birth, and the birth year” (175). The experience of motherhood as a journey is another common denominator between Erdrich’s two memoirs. In Books and Islands Erdrich, embarking on a trip with an eighteen-month-old baby, describes the time composed mainly of “the doing of what the baby wants” (BIOC 28), and of nature observations and playtime, but also of worries about daughters left behind – she never stops being a mother to all of her children, it is a full-time job. While Erdrich again attempts to juggle tasks, the baby is curious and friendly, cooperative, apparently enjoys the outings and the nature: “I’ve filmed eagles and those young moose, dancing loons and zhegeg, pelicans, with one hand while she nurses away. Indeed . . . I have been filming everything I’ve described all along, as well as somehow brandishing a pen and notebook, all while nursing. One grows used to it” (BIOC 65). With this baby however, there is a noticeable shift. In the first memoir it is obvious that Erdrich needs to remain a writer while being a mother. In Books and Islands, when describing how she sleeps with the baby holding onto its foot, she discloses an intimate thought, shocking again and potentially upsetting to her readers: “Her toes curl around my fingers. I could even stop writing books” (BIOC 65). Luckily she does not keep her promise and continues writing. 2016 saw the publication of her newest novel LaRose.

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Book-islands In tracing the history of books, she turns to trees, and in thinking of first libraries, she names lakes: The Ojibwe had been using the word mazinibaganjigan for years to describe dental pictographs made on birchbark, perhaps the first books made in North America. Yes, I figure books have been written around here ever since someone had the idea of biting or even writing on birchbark with a sharpened stick. Books are nothing all that new. People have been writing books in North America since at least 2000 B.C. or painting islands. You could think of the lakes as libraries. (BIOC 5)

Persistently repeated refrain-like in the book, she asks the question central to her life: “Books. Why?” A question “that has defined my life, the question that has saved my life, and the question that most recently has resulted in the questionable enterprise of starting a bookstore” (BIOC 4). She has a penchant for repetitions and making lists in this memoir – all for the sake of emphasis of what truly matters to her. “Books. Why?” “Because our brains hurt” (BIOC 6); “To read and read while nursing a baby” (BIOC 17); “So we can talk to you even though we are dead. Here we are, the writer and I, regarding each other” (BIOC 55); “Because they are wealth, sobriety, and hope” (BIOC 99); “So I can talk to other humans without having to meet them. Fear of boredom. So that I will never be alone” (BIOC 141). What is striking about these raisons d’être of reading is the need for a seemingly irreconcilable dialogue: for company, for constant entertainment, as well as for occasional moments of solace and solitude. She tackles various fields of life in her memoir, not only literature. No subject is too small to coincide with her stories on books, and so the reader is treated to tales of wood ticks, moose, pelicans, and packing rituals among many others.

Home Library Louise Erdrich is not only a prolific writer, but also a voracious reader. Her memoirs are sprinkled with books, plots, citations, bits of information about authors. It is often said that one’s own library tells volumes of its owner, the books one has and reads define who one is. Louise Erdrich is a reader and a collector, by default believing in surplus and creative adaptations thereof. Of her home library she says:

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We have a lot of books in our house. They are our primary decorative motif—books in piles on the coffee table, framed book covers, books sorted into stacks on every available surface, and of course books on shelves along most walls. Besides the visible books, there are the boxes waiting in the wings, the basement books, the garage books, the storage locker books. They are a sort of insulation, soundproofing some walls. They function as furniture, they prop up sagging fixtures and disguised by quilts function as tables. The quantities and types of books are fluid, arriving like hysterical cousins in overnight shipping envelopes only to languish near the overflowing mail bench. Advance Reading Copies collect at bedside, to be dutifully examined—to ignore them and read Henry James or Barbara Pym instead becomes a guilty pleasure. I can’t imagine home without an overflow of books. The point of books is to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough, or the right one at the right moment, but then sometimes to find you’d longed to fall asleep reading The Aspern Papers, and there it is. (BIOC 9)

One almost has the impression that books are like family members or close friends, surrounding Erdrich and witnessing her daily life. Reading is an integral part of her existence as a writer, as a mother, as a human being.

Organizing the Overflow and the Surplus: Lists, Catalogs, and Enumerations These two autobiographical accounts amaze with their penchant for listing and cataloging. The Blue Jay’s Dance thrives on surplus manifested as “The occasional abundance verging on excess, especially with regard to seemingly trivial and irrelevant issues, such as gardening and the encyclopedic specification of plant names, cooking and ready-made recipes for numerous dishes” (Skwarska 139). In autobiographical narratives this tactic can serve the purpose of validation, of inducing belief, since this is not fiction and one is not asked to willingly suspend the disbelief. I would argue that her enumerations are also meant to infuse her experiences with a wider appeal: “I am not a scientist, not a naturalist, not a chef, not an expert, not the best or the worst mother, but a writer only, a woman constantly surprised” (BJD x). She is “a woman constantly surprised” by the ubiquitous abundance of everything around her and attempts to organize the flow of information and wisdom. She is thus an individual located in the context of other individuals, other women, other mothers, other writers, other gardeners and other book readers, collectors and booksellers, for she also owns a bookstore.

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Birchbark Books & Native Arts Having lived and worked among books for so long, perhaps it does not come as a surprise that in 2000 Erdrich founded a bookstore in Minneapolis. She writes, reads, recommends, and sells books to others hoping to create communities of readers; she says “Little bookstores are community services, not profitable business enterprises” (Halliday 2010). She says of the bookstore: “I started it with my daughters for idealistic reasons – the native community, the neighborhood, the chance to work on something worthy with my girls” (BIOC 137). Her daughter Persia is responsible for choosing children’s books they will be selling (Halliday 2010). The name of the bookstore goes back to historical times when “Ojibwe people were great writers from way back and synthesized the oral and written tradition by keeping mnemonic scrolls of inscribed birchbark. The first paper, the first books” (BIOC 11). Erdrich conceived of it as a refuge for bookworms offering pure comfort. Jelly beans, pretzels, and sour cherry bites are free. To create the store, we gutted a dentist’s office and brought unpeeled birch trees in to make a loft and birch boards to make floor-to-ceiling shelves . . . The bookstore looks like the inside of a cabin on Ober’s island. There is an old Catholic confessional against one wall. (BIOC 137)

That old Roman Catholic confessional attests to Erdrich’s penchant for eclecticism, not only religious but also cultural. The confessional, as well as the canoe hanging from the ceiling, and a loft built for children create a unique browsing and reading experience. I visited the bookstore in 2009 and was amazed to find post-it notes with reviews scribbled and signed by Erdrich stuck to books. The bookstore provides a variety of services in addition to selling books on its premises. One can order books online. One can attend bookstore events, e.g. The Birchbark Books Reading Series with debuting and established writers, native and non-Native, and find Erdrich very often present: “I am often thrilled when I can sit in the bookstore audience and listen to Susan Power or Jim Northrup read from their work. Writers sign our back wall. Our bathroom is papered with poems” (BIOC 139). The bookstore became an important part of the cultural landscape in Minneapolis, and it is not uncommon for people from different cities, states, and countries to pilgrimage to Birchbark Books for “It is a home for people who love books and a place that cannot be duplicated by any bookstore corporation—it is just too personal” (BIOC 139). Erdrich

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herself loves its ambiance and comes in as often as possible, a true lover of books: besides my daily visits, sometimes I come to the store at night. I love to be among the books and to fuss them into pleasant order, just the way I love moving plants around in my garden. One of our booksellers, watching me, says, “Oh, you’ve come to love the books again?” Being around books is only half about actual reading, after all. The other part is talking about books with other people, a rich topic, and yet another is enjoying their presence. Sitting in the bookstore half-light I feel a great contentment. (BIOC 139)

In an attempt to dialogue with the customers of the bookstore, Erdrich taped the question “What book would you take to a desert island?” on the bookstore counter. It is accompanied by “a request to customers to write their favorites on slips of paper, a way to find out about their tastes and discover titles that we’ve overlooked” (BIOC 140). The bookstore is meant to promote a two-way communication, a dialogue between those who run it and those who are its customers. The bookstore is unique, in the words of Erdrich: We attract writers, especially Native writers, and we host literary events, which means, again, the bookstore is more than a business—it is an arts organization. We support a number of Native artists: basket makers and jewelers and painters. We sell medicines grown by a Dakota family: sage, sweetgrass, bear root . . . .With a small bookstore, you get to encourage your eccentricities. It’s quite a wonderful thing, this bookstore. I thought it would be a project for my daughters and me, some work we could do together, and that has happened. Each daughter has worked in the store. (Halliday 2010)

The bookstore team tries to promote reading from an early age and reaches out to kids with a wide and carefully selected range of children’s books (Native American titles mostly). It is a bookstore with intellectual, aesthetic and social goals, promoting education and arts among the local community.

Birchbark Blog, Facebook Page and The Birchbark House Fund In order to cultivate the dialogue the bookstore jumpstarted, in 2007 Louise Erdrich started blogging about books, authors, and events hosted in the store. While Erdrich blogs about her reading adventures, writes book

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reviews, readers can leave comments and they do. Sometimes Erdrich will address their comments in her entry, but it was not until 2011 when she started commenting on readers’ comments. Often readers express gratitude and admiration for her books. Her entries are generally rare, but usually quite long and very thoughtful. Around the time she received the National Book Award (November 14th, 2012), an official Louise Erdrich Facebook page was set up, managed by her, her co—workers at Birchbark Books, and her publishing house HarperCollins. Glimpses from her life are posted there, as well as links to her articles, even photographs of hand-written pages from the new novel are on display. In this digital era she continues a dialogue she started with her blog and now extends it to this most popular social medium, a communicating tool in a dialogical gesture towards the Internet users and readers all over the world. The Birchbark House Fund at the Minneapolis Foundation was created in 2008 by sisters Heid and Louise Erdrich. The website informs that it promotes Ojibwe and other indigenous languages, and provides support to artists involved in “the revitalization of Native American languages for the spiritual, physical, and material health of the people” (birchbarkhouse.org). Erdrich calls it an “affiliated nonprofit press that will publish in the Ojibwe and Dakota languages” (Halliday 2010). The amount and versatility of tasks Erdrich juggles is overwhelming, as is her engagement and efforts dedicated to the development of her community. She defines herself synecdochically in relation to her surroundings, even if, as a writer, she often thrives on solitude, she says asked if writing was “a lonely life” for her, “Strangely, I think it is. I am surrounded by an abundance of family and friends, and yet I am alone with the writing. And that is perfect” (Halliday 2010). She also collaborates creatively with her daughter. Aza Erdrich designs her book covers, also in a dialogic fashion, as Erdrich wrote in her blog post on July 8, 2013: “We always talk about the book covers before she goes into them. I never know what she’ll come up with though. As HarperCollins reissues my backlist books, she does the covers” (Erdrich, “Aza”). Before that, she has also had a modicum of control over her book covers: That’s because the most clichéd Native images used to be suggested for the cover design, so I fought to have some say. On a foreign copy of Tracks there was a pair of massive breasts with an amulet hanging between them. Often, a Southwestern landscape appears. Or an Indian princess or two. A publisher once sent me a design for Master Butchers Singing Club that was all huge loops of phallic sausages. They were of every shape and all

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different textures, colors, sizes. I showed it to my daughter and we looked at it in stunned silence, then we said, Yes! This is a great cover! I have twenty copies left of that edition, and I’m going to keep them. Sometimes I’ll show one to a man and ask what he thinks of it. He’ll put it in his lap and look at it for a while and the strangest look will cross his face. He’ll look sideways at the women in the room, and he’ll point and say, I think I see myself in that one. (Halliday 2010)

She has also done a collaborative installation with Aza Erdrich, Pallas Erdrich, and Heid E. Erdrich titled “Louise Erdrich: Asynchronous Reading merging visual art and text” and consisting of “Erdrich’s paintings, collage boxes, and found-object constructions along with poetic text and audio works” (Bockley Gallery).

Conclusion According to Skwarska, The Blue Jay’s Dance, and I would argue Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country as well, are dialogic, synecdochic: While the “self”-referential character of the account might imply emphasis on the individual self, The Blue Jay’s Dance is both Erdrich’s circumscribing of herself in her individuality and her inscribing herself into the continuity of women, mothers, and writers. (142)

The Blue Jay’s Dance and Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country record daily battles: little failures and victories bringing to the fore the nexus of motherhood, the act of writing, and the surrounding nature, underscoring life’s complexity and ambiguity. In The Blue Jay’s Dance “The balancing act between self and selflessness, sanity and depression is palpable” (Stirrup 176) whereas The older mother of Books and Islands, mother to an infant-toddler rather than a baby, reflects less on this consuming self-abnegation; seems more content . . . .Not that the mother of Blue Jay is a reluctant mother; but she expresses in this memoir the internal conflicts that possess most motherdaughter relationships in her fiction, that maintain a constant battle between being individuals and belonging to one another, teaching one another. (Stirrup 176)

Erdrich herself calls The Blue Jay’s Dance “a personal search and an extended wondering at life’s complexity” (BJD 5). She describes the memoir as “a book of babyhood, a book about luck, cats, a writing life, wild places in the world, and my husband’s cooking. It is a book about the

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vitality between mothers and infants, that passionate and artful bond into which we pour the direct expression of our being” (BJD 5). For Erdrich, writing, reading, parenting, domestic rituals and nature are entwined: the domestic, the natural and the intellectual elements are combined in a dance, a blue jay’s dance, strange and desperate at times. She is a concerned observer of nature and very often sees it as her obligation to intervene and save an animal. Erdrich constructs not only an image of a struggling writer, but also a struggling mother, wife, woman. To apply Shafak’s words, Erdrich is fully aware that “To be human, therefore, means to live with an orchestra of conflicting voices and mixed emotions” (BM xii), to embrace ambiguity, as one lives with a multi-voiced consciousness. In an interview titled “The Art of Fiction” Erdrich speaks of handling inspiration when one is engaged in a competitive activity, i.e. getting ideas while driving and if it is “a very empty stretch of road I do write with one hand” (Hannigan 2012). Sometimes she has to stop if she is driving along with a child: I will usually pull up into a Culver’s or gas station parking lot and say, “if you are very quiet while I write, there will be French fries.” That almost always works, but still, there are times the thought vanishes just because I, then, think of French fries. Perhaps by having children, I’ve both sabotaged and saved myself as a writer. Being a mother and a Native American are important aspects of my work, and even more than being mixed blood or Native, it’s difficult to be a mother and a writer. (Hannigan 2012)

It is difficult to be a mother and a writer for another reason as well: motherhood is a cliché-ridden state. You’re always fighting sentiment. You’re fighting sentimentality all of the time because being a mother alerts you in such a primal way. You are alerted to any danger to your child, and by extension you become afraid of anybody getting hurt. This becomes the most powerful thing to you; it’s instinctual. Either you end up writing about terrible things happening to children—as if you could ward them off simply by writing about them—or you time things up in easily opened packages, or you pull your punches as a writer. All deadfalls to watch for. (Hannigan 2012)

The permanent state of feeling responsible for one’s children dictates scenarios one has to be aware of, otherwise they will seep unobstructed into the prose one is writing. The mother-writer has to be alert not to have her one-track, children-oriented mind dominate her writing. But she also argues she is the kind of writer she is because of her children.

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A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff claimed that in The Blue Jay’s Dance Erdrich combined “narrative and poetic skill” (186). In accordance with Ruoff’s assertion, I would like to conclude this chapter with excerpts from a poem by Erdrich speaking of priorities in the life of a mother-writer. The poem titled “Advice to Myself” is another dialogue between the selves, the writer talking to a mother and a housekeeper in herself: “Leave the dishes. / Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator / And earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor. / Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster” (149). This array of tasks is seen as not crucial but timeand energy-consuming in view of other, more pressing activities. Erdrich gently chastises and simultaneously absolves herself, she tells herself to adopt a “let it be” attitude when it comes to domestic chores. In an absolutory gesture she pleads with herself: “Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins” (“Advice” 149). Patching things will not advance humankind and ingenious, yet effortless solutions, such as safety pins, might be just as valuable, for they save time and effort. Letting nature run its course can also be liberating: “Let the wind have its way, then the earth” (“Advice” 149), she says. It can be a way of letting the elements and ancestors “speak” in her household. She tells herself off for paying attention to the tyranny of matching things, when something else altogether matters, matching words, matching thoughts, pursuing what truly matters: “decide first / what is authentic, / then go after it with all your heart” (“Advice” 149). In a personal manifesto-like lines, Erdrich, by then an experienced mother and writer, lets go of the unimportant in favor of what is real and what is of value: words and thoughts in daily communication and in her writing. Love is what matters: “Your heart, that place / you don’t even think of cleaning out. / That closet stuffed with savage mementos” (“Advice” 149). One usually is eager to clean actual places, but hearts remain cluttered, with cobwebs of memories, regrets, and worries. The quotidian calls: cooking, cleaning, sorting, phone calls, but Erdrich tells herself not to answer, instead she should talk to her ancestors. The ambitious reader in Erdrich tells the mother and the housekeeper in her to be selective, to read only that which “destroys / the insulation between yourself and your experience” (“Advice” 150). The final advice is to read books which remove the reader from a comfort zone, which negotiate the dissonance between what one should do and what one wants to do. She seems to be saying that seeing the larger picture is a panacea for the insane daily rush, for the perpetual feeling of not having enough time to accomplish everything one needs or is expected to. Erdrich, as in her life so in her writing, embraces all forms of behavior: failures and successes are equally valuable, a part of a continuum, even if she seems to

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keep a big silence as part of her family history. Life is messy, no one is perfect. A dialogue cannot be perfect, either. Sometimes it constitutes only a semblance of, an attempt at inter—action.

CHAPTER V A TETRALOGY, OR ONE LONG BOOK

“Everything is all knotted up in a tangle. Pull one string of this family and the whole web will tremble.” (The Antelope Wife 1998, 239)

Erdrich’s writing and re—writing practice is dialogic. Her writing is in dialogue even with other activities in her life, be they marital, familyrelated, or professional entrepreneurships. Erdrich continues writing her opus and the family of texts grows. “Family” is the keyword when it comes to the formal and thematic spectrum of her work. It is also a metaphor for her dialogism: texts constitute families and are dialogic, families reverberate throughout texts dialogically, intra—textually. Initially termed a tetralogy, the series of her novels grew beyond the four books without a clear beginning (the case of “Tracks” and Love Medicine) and with no end in sight, as her new novel has just been published. According to Bakhtin, the novel, in contrast to other genres, “reflects more deeply, more essentially, more sensitively and rapidly, reality itself in the process of its unfolding. Only that which is itself developing can comprehend development as a process” (7). The objective of this chapter is to demonstrate how Erdrich re—writes the novel as a genre, and how Erdrich’s selected novels in particular, compost-pile-like are internally dialogic; elements are continuously added and compose an entity. By stressing the open-ended quality of the narrative fabric paired with complex and dynamic protagonists, the novel prioritizes the process, not the outcome. A particular ecology of writing is employed by Erdrich, i.e. a strategy of re—cycling, re—processing, re—using themes and protagonists, and repeatedly passing them through a novelistic cycle again without sounding repetitious. Erdrich builds a web of connections, related stories, characters, places, events, and the alert reader receives a dialogic opportunity to participate in (re—)creating the stories of families by piecing their elements together. I am re—reading Bakhtin through Erdrich in order to expand, stretch, and add to his theoretical input and to formulate and refine a dialogic

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approach to Louise Erdrich’s oeuvre. I want to unpack, or disentangle the term employed to describe her novels, namely tetralogy (referring to Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, Tracks, and The Bingo Palace), which evolved into “one long book” (including Love Medicine, Tracks, Four Souls, The Bingo Palace, Tales of Burning Love, The Painted Drum, and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse), and other books in the series (two thematic clusters: The Beet Queen and The Master Butchers Singing Club; and The Plague of Doves, The Round House and LaRose). Asked whether she feels like she’s writing one long novel, she responds “All of the books will be connected somehow–by history and blood and by something I have no control over, which is the writing itself. The writing is going to connect where it wants to, and I will have to try and follow along” (Halliday 2010). The term “series” encompasses all of these novels. Erdrich is writing a series of books in installments, or chapters, as she herself says. This is the concept of dialogism expanded upon by Erdrich. But, first I want to cast a look at “family,” simultaneously the main theme and the main group “protagonist” of Erdrich’s books.

“Power travels in the bloodlines, handed out before birth” (T 31): Bloodlines, Knots, and Tangles Secret and apparent bloodlines throb in the veins of Erdrich’s novels. Seriality and sequentiality are attributed to her novels for adults as well as those for young adults and children. In the “Thanks and Acknowledgments” section of her book for young readers titled The Birchbark House (1999), Erdrich says “This book and those that will follow are an attempt to retrace my own family’s history.” So far The Game of Silence, The Porcupine Year, and Chickadee have been written as sequels and Erdrich claims she wants to write more books about Omakayas and her family who lived long ago. Tracing and disentangling families is a project not only reserved for her fiction, it seems. She writes those books in another dialogue, with her daughters. Asked whether her daughters help her when she writes books for children, Erdrich responds “They are great editors—they read and react. When my older daughters were little, I used to tell them the story of a little girl marooned alone on an island; everyone else has died. My daughters wanted that story over and over, so finally I wrote it down” (Halliday 2010). Beidler observed that the protagonist of The Birchbark House, Omakayas, a girl who plays chess and exhibits healing talents, is reminiscent of “a younger Fleur Pillager in Tracks and even Lipsha in

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Love Medicine” (“A Review of The Birchbark House” 88). Another character from the story, Old Tallow, “has a familiar ring to her as another of Erdrich’s strong-willed and independent women” (88). One thinks, again, of Fleur, but also of Margaret in Tracks, of Marie and Lulu in Love Medicine, and even of Dot and June in Love Medicine and Tales of Burning Love. How to disentangle the complex strands of family stories as spun by Erdrich? Sister Leopolda is Marie Kashpaw’s mother, Lulu Nanapush is Fleur Pillager’ daughter. Nector is married to Marie and has a life-long affair with Lulu. Lipsha is adopted by Marie and and he is Lulu’s grandson. In a self-reflective, intra—textual gesture the “we” narrator in The Bingo Palace observes: The story comes around, pushing at our brains, and soon we are trying to travel back to the beginning, trying to put families into order and make sense of things. But we start with one person, and soon another and another follows, and still another, until we are lost in the connections. (BP 5)

The family becomes the protagonist of Erdrich’s novels. Configurations thereof may vary and are rarely of traditional, biological design; take Lipsha and Lyman for example, who are relations, rivals, and co—workers. Because they are family, there is a story: “our relationship is complicated by some factors over which we have no control. His real father was my stepfather. His mother is my grandmother. His half brother is my father. I have an instant crush upon his girl” (BP 16). With a story and bloodlines this complicated, there are bound to be tragic and comic situations; the overall effect of her novels being tragicomedies. Already in Love Medicine Lipsha Morrissey is the character with a troubled, fractured family history. He is abandoned by his mother June, does not know his father is Gerry Nanapush, is raised by Marie Lazarre Kashpaw and Nector Kashpaw, and later adopted by his grandmother Lulu Lamartine. Lulu, is a similar case in point, a Pillager by blood (most probably – her paternity is debated, the community speculates that she was the result of Fleur’s rape or Fleur’s relations with Misshepeshu, the water monster), she takes her last name from Nanapush and from her husbands: Morrissey and Lamartine, thus she is at the inter—sections of multiple families. Lipsha has a half-brother, King, with whom he never gets along. His sense of self is pure confusion, and his loyalties and goals are in a state of disarray. He is more of an anti-hero. Most of his life he is ignorant of his family ties and believes that his own mother “wanted to tie me in a potato sack and throw me in a slough” (LM 93, 226). To learn that he is a

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descendant of the Pillagers, which explains his healing touch, and that his father is alive, empowers him. Albertine Johnson says about Lipsha Although he never did well in school, Lipsha knew surprising things. He read books about computers and volcanoes and the life cycles of salamanders. Sometimes he used words I had to ask him the meaning of, and other times he didn’t make even the simplest sense. I loved him for being both ways. (LM 93, 39)

Even though he is helpless in school, he is intelligent. He cannot be pigeon-holed, he is unpredictable, he can be ingenious when no one expects it. He is ambivalent, he is human, prone to mistakes, a very likeable character. Lost and devoid of direction in his life, he is aware that “I never really done much with my life” (LM 93, 226). But there is one skill he possesses: “I know the tricks of mind and body inside out without ever having trained for it, because I got the touch. It’s a thing you got to be born with. I got secrets in my hands that nobody ever knew to ask” (LM 93, 227). He knows he has a talent, but does not know where it comes from. The touch comes and goes, it works with his grandmother Marie, but it does not do anything for his grandfather Nector. Lulu takes care of his ignorance. She always knew he was “troubled. You never knew who you were. That’s one reason why I told you. I thought it was a knowledge that could make or break you” (LM 93, 303). Lipsha now knows, but still blunders, he is a human being. The thematic fabric of Erdrich’s novels concerns families and relationships. How then is the structural and narrative fabric constructed?

One Long Book Erdrich began writing poetry, then continued with short stories which turned into novels, thus her “poet’s prose” (Silko 178) grew organically, gradually, by accruing, and “In time, the poems became more storylike— prose, really—then the stories began to connect” (Halliday 2010). Erdrich said of her poetry: ”my poems are narrative, more like stories than poems” (Grantham 12). These practices are not synonymous, and she is “a novelist as well as a poet and the narrative strength of the poems presages the impact of her novels. But the poet and the novelist practice different crafts” (Jahner 32). Short stories underwent trans—formations, grew into novels, which then became related, creating a saga of texts about families of Pillagers, Nanapushes, Kashpaws, Lamartines, Morrisseys, Lazarres, and others. Asked whether she still writes poems, Erdrich says

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I stopped thinking like a poet back when I started writing narrative poems. Occasionally I get some poetry, and I’ll write poetry for as long as I can. But it is as though I’ve been temporarily excused by the novel, and it wants me back. So I usually put whatever poetry I would have written into the novel. I only keep a few of my poems as poems. (Halliday 2010)

She does that because It usually turns out that the poem was connected to the prose in a subterranean way. If I am writing a novel, it casts an aura around me and I get ideas for it, descriptions, words, phases, at all times. I’m always jotting in notebooks I keep with me. That delight of immersion in a book is as good as a trance. For a while, the book is so powerful that I can follow the thread even through my chaotic daily existence, with children at all hours, school, dinner, long calls to my daughters, my ever-demanding house, barking dogs, and the bookstore. (Halliday 2010)

In a 1993 interview Erdrich said “I don’t know how many books are related and how many not” (Feyl Chavkin and Chavkin 225). Her ambiguity is an opening for dialogism: she does not know, ergo anything can happen. Her oeuvre is open-ended, keeps evolving. The writer herself cannot predict the outcome of her own creativity and the effects thereof. It is dependent on the dialogues with, e.g. the protagonists who might occupy her mind. She understands that she is “writing one long book in which the main chapters are also books titled Tracks, Four Souls, The Bingo Palace, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, and The Painted Drum” (Erdrich, “Author’s Note” 5) in addition to Love Medicine. The books she is writing resist closure, protagonists return and demand attention, and the author complies by writing new tales. The tetralogy according to Erdrich consists of Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, Tracks, and The Bingo Palace. Why did she leave out The Beet Queen from her enumeration? The novel was often criticized for not being sufficiently concerned with Native American issues, and I wonder whether that is why Erdrich, wary of the criticism, has decided not to include it into her “one long book” list. Why did she not mention Tales of Burning Love? Erdrich is writing one long book in installments, or chapters, as she herself says. Before I will name the installments and elaborate how certain books tie-in better with other books within the series, I am interested in the narrative fabric of Erdrich’s novels and the modalities of reader participation.

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Narrative Fabric Narratologist Mieke Bal describes a narrative text as a text where an agent tells a story through a medium, e.g. language. The story constitutes “the content of that text, and produces a particular manifestation, inflection, and ‘colouring’ of a fabula; the fabula is presented in a certain manner . . . [the story] is a series of logically and chronologically related events that are caused or experienced by actors” (Bal 5). While the story is “the logic of events” (Bal 7), the fabula is more dialogic, more inter—active, for it is an individual memory imprint, “the result of the mental activity of reading, the interpretation by the reader, an interpretation influenced both by the initial encounter with the text and by the manipulations of the story” (Bal 10). The story “does not consist of material different from that of either text or the fabula, but . . . this material is looked at from a certain, specific angle” (Bal 75). In Erdrich’s texts, oftentimes the story is not stable, not one. The same event is narrated by different narrators, sometimes in different moments in the books, sometimes different books, which constitutes a very interesting case of layering, complicating and destabilizing the narrative structure. Also, the fabula as “a memory trace” (Bal 10), can differ from reader to reader of Erdrich’s books, not only because our memories work differently, but because it depends on the reader’s order of reading the novels and a resulting construction of the narrative microcosm emerging from Erdrich’s novels. According to Bal, the narrator is “the most central concept in the analysis of narrative texts” (Bal 18). She notes: “The identity of the narrator, the degree to which and the manner in which that identity is indicated in the text, and the choices that are implied lend the text its specific character” (Bal 18). Since Erdrich employs multiple narrators within one novel, the concept remains central, yet the narrative authority and responsibility are distributed among many individuals and the text does not have a monolithic character. Quennet asserts that Erdrich’s “multivoiced narrative” is realized by the prominent usage of first-person narration she embellishes with other forms of narration, other points of view (Quennet 45). Different narrators abound in Erdrich’s prose and often differ in their perceptions, which makes the communal story they tell more dialogic. In Tracks Nanapush narrates the story to Lulu in a secondperson voice, and the community speaks in first-person plural in The Bingo Palace. The one long book has a unique oral and dialogic quality insofar as “The same story is told from different points of view and different but interrelated stories are told from more than one perspective. Stories

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constantly overlap, contradict, and comment on one another” (Quennet 45). These stories and their narrators engage in multiple dialogues. The rape of Fleur is narrated by different persons in The Beet Queen and in Tracks, and these narratives complement and compete with each other, constituting varying and subjective, equally valid versions of the episode (Quennet 47), and presenting many co—existing truths instead of one absolute, comfortable resolution. Such a technique unsettles and foments ambiguity in Erdrich’s novels thus probing the limitations of the genre. Rick Altman points out that the narrative text involves the narrator following protagonist(s) or character(s) which translates into “the reader’s sense of following a character from action to action and scene to scene . . . .Not until the narrator begins to follow a particular character will the text be recognizable as narrative” (15-16). Following differs from point of view in that “Point of view always involves, however transitorily, the use of a character as a secondary filter of information” (22). Narratives can follow one character from beginning to end, or multiple characters. In Tracks, the story is narrated from two different viewpoints (Pauline and Nanapush) but includes a multiple-following pattern focusing also on Lulu and Fleur. The narrative voices create a subtle balance, while Pauline destroys (families, friendships, cultural heritage, herself), Nanapush restores and nurtures. A single-focus narration or following pattern are non-existent in Erdrich’s writing. Her novels never concentrate solely on and follow a single individual, instead they are always multiple-focus narratives. Since it is “Discontinuous, fragmented, resisting consistent reader identification, multiple-focus narrative requires a mode of reading different from that of dual-focus and single-focus narrative” (Altman 262), a more dialogic and participatory mode. Multiple-focus texts “set familiar pieces into unexpected patterns, calling into question the comfortable habits of the reader” (Altman 262), coax them “to ask questions of a farreaching nature” (Altman 263), to enter into a dialogue with the literary work. Bakhtin believed the crucial characteristic of language to be its internal stratification. According to Bal, he believed that “language use—or rather, discourse—is always intertwining of different discourses coming from a variety of backgrounds. This principle is known as the dialogic principle. What Bakhtinians call dialogue, however, is better understood as a metaphor that underscores the heterogeneity of discourse” (Bal 69). The dialogic principle translates into “a mix of different discourses” (Bal 69). This heteroglossia serves a purpose in Erdrich’s work, namely it reflects and includes the cultural diversity of her protagonists. According to Bal,

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The dialogic principle opens closed doors, makes multiple experiences visible, includes instead of excluding. It recognizes and prioritizes specificity, instead of discriminatory universal qualities, as I have continued to insist while analyzing Erdrich’s novels and its episodes.

Inter—active Exercise in Reading Much agency is attributed to the readers, for in Erdrich’s novels “the order of telling is up to the narrator and the audience members are intimately involved in the fleshing out of the narrative and the supplying of the connections between related stories” (Sands 37). This agency can result in anxiety and/or empowerment on the part of the reader. Catherine Rainwater speaks also of frustration triggered by the narrative structure of the novel, of the “conflicting codes” of different cultural backgrounds existing in the text (164). The presence of very diverse Western-European and Native American concepts of spiritual beliefs and family ties “vexes the reader’s effort to decide upon an unambiguous, epistemologically consistent interpretive framework” (Rainwater 165). In other words, the reader has to “pause ‘between worlds’ to discover the arbitrary structural principles of both” (Rainwater 176). Rainwater speaks of “disempowerment” and feelings of “marginality” this can cause to the reader deprived of clear guidance. Rainwater asserts different epistemologies are needed in order to understand Love Medicine. As a white reader, I employ my own epistemologies while reading and analyzing Erdrich’s novels, and my practice will never be complete, will always remain subjective and eccentric, as will be any other reader’s. I find the humorous passages the easiest to understand, for humor denotes what Bakhtin called a “surplus of humanness.” When Nector tells his mother Rushes Bear of Moby Dick, the book he reads, “What’s in it?” she asks. “The story of the great white whale” (LM 93, 121). She is baffled: “What do they got to wail about, those whites?” (LM 93, 121). The pun works on different levels and comments in a humorous manner on Native American views of white people and vice versa: it is dialogic. Also it is a poignant moment in the

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novel when Native storytelling enters into a dialogue with Western literary tradition. Inter—textuality also requires a form of reader participation, where the reading pleasure is contingent on the reader’s successful decoding of literary or other cultural allusions embedded in the text. But the epistemological tension can also prove productive, for the “reader must consider a possibility forcefully posited in all of Erdrich’s works . . . [that] the world takes on the shape of the stories we tell,” and that points of orientation can easily shift (Rainwater 177). Knowledge is disseminated dialogically, not monopolized, and yet “such anecdotal narration is notoriously biased and fragmented . . . .The same incidents are told and retold, accumulating tidbits of information. There is, after all, no identifiable right version, no right tone, no right interpretation” (Sands 37). No one character knows the entire story. Yet precisely in this penchant for ambivalence, its questions with multiple choices and no one true answer, lies the puissance of Erdrich’s writing, which is edifying without passing moral judgments. The novels do not subscribe to the “either/or” but to the “both/and” logic, as Lulu Lamartine says in Love Medicine: “Right and wrong were shades of meaning, not sides of a coin” (LM 93, 76). Erdrich’s novels presume reader-participation similar to traditional oral storytelling contexts. As a consequence the readers are invested with agency, with power to be in a dialogue with the novelistic work, in addition to their fabula-constructing activity, i.e. building their memory imprint of a given novel. It is the reader who is forced to shift position, turn, ponder, and finally integrate the story into a coherent whole by recognizing the indestructible connections between the characters and events of the narrative(s). Hence the novel places the reader in a paradoxically dual stance, simultaneously on the fringe of the story yet at the very center of the process—distant and intimate, passive yet very actively involved in the narrative process. (Sands 35)

The responsibility in the process of reading and making sense of the story is shared: it is the author’s (to write a compelling story), the characters’ (to speak to the writer), and the reader’s (to decode it). The readers of Erdrich’s novels can be daunted by the work they are asked to perform, as The incidents of the novel must be carried in the reader’s mind, constantly reshuffled and reinterpreted as new events are revealed and the narrative biases of each character are exposed. Each version, each viewpoint jars things loose just when they seem hammered into place. It’s a process that is disconcerting to the reader, keeping a distance between the characters and keeping the reader in emotional upheaval. (Sands 39)

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The reader puts the puzzle of the story together, only to discover new pieces in the process. Little security is offered. Love Medicine engages the reader long-term in “Discovering the truth [sic!] from the collection of both tragic and comic positions presented in the separate episodes demands that we stick around to bridge the gaps” (Sands 39). The reader is actively involved, intellectually and emotionally invested. The novel’s “narratives and narrators are potent. They invite us to participate in their events and emotions and in the exhilarating process of making the story come out right” (Sands 42). There is no right story, but it is up to the reader to assist with it. Intra—textuality creates a dialogue, a loop. By being in the loop, by reading the installments of Erdrich’s one long book, the reader is part of the dialogue. Or as Quennet posits: “Intratextuality is used to connect each novel to the others and thus form a quartet” (72). I posit however, that the term “tetralogy” is not apt, the intra—textual novels spill beyond a quartet of novels. I proceed with an analysis of a cluster of novel installments which are intra—textual with each other and merge into one long book, including the novels Love Medicine, Tracks, Fours Souls, The Bingo Palace, Tales of Burning Love, The Painted Drum. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse receives extensive treatment in the first and sixth chapter, therefore I will not elaborate on it here. The first cluster foregrounds Ojibwe protagonists mostly, in addition to several mixed-bloods and white protagonists. The second cluster encompasses The Beet Queen and The Master Butchers Singing Club spotlighting white immigrant protagonists and very few Ojibwe ones. The Plague of Doves, The Round House and LaRose, focusing on complex issues of tribal justice, create the third cluster. The Antelope Wife and Shadow Tag remain tentatively outside, for they share neither protagonists, nor episodes with the above-mentioned clusters and perhaps separate categories for them should be invented.

1. Love Medicine, Tracks, Four Souls, The Bingo Palace, Tales of Burning Love, The Painted Drum, and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. I made the distinction based on the themes represented in these books and the families that are protagonists of these novels: Nanapush, the Pillagers (Simon Jack, Anaquot, Fleur, Moses, Lulu, Gerry, Lipsha), the Kashpaws (Nector, Marie, Lipsha, Zelda, Aurelia, Albertine, Gordie, June), the Lazzarres (Marie), the Puyats (Pauline/Sister Leopolda), the Morrisseys (Napoleon, Bernadette, Lulu), and the Lamartines (Lulu, Lyman, Henry Jr.). The novels portray the lives of several families whose bloodlines and

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fates are inter—related, impossible to disentangle without causing stir. This is internal dialogism at its best, where novels are about families and complicated familial ties (including adoptive relations), are reminiscent of such families (complex and not traditional), and constitute families of texts.

Love Medicine (1984) Bakhtin asserted that the novel as a genre defies definitions, is inconclusive and pliable. Erdrich’s practice of writing novels goes further than this assertion. Her novels are not only inconclusive and pliable they also defy gravity whenever she re—writes and re—publishes them, or when she co—wrote them in dialogue with Michael Dorris. Love Medicine officially inaugurated the long book Erdrich is writing: I started writing Love Medicine after I realized that narrative was invading the poetry. In the beginning, I was trying to write a spare kind of poetry, like James Wright or Robert Creeley, I suppose, but it was terrible. Then I started writing poems with inner rhymes but as they became more complex they turned into narrative. I started telling stories in the poems. But the poems I could write jumping up from my desk or lying on the bed. Anywhere. At last, I had this epiphany. I wanted to write prose, and I understood that my real problem with writing was not that couldn’t do it mentally. I couldn’t do it physically. I could not sit still. Literally, could not sit still. So I had to solve that. I used some long scarves to tie myself into my chair. I tied myself in with a pack of cigarettes on one side and coffee on the other, and when I instinctively bolted upright after a few minutes, I’d say, Oh, shit. I’m tied down. I’ve got to keep writing. (Halliday 2010)

Novel writing required much more self-discipline and focus. Creating novelistic inter—connectedness is no small feat. According to Bennett, Love Medicine constitutes “a part of a greater whole, a series of novels set on or near a Chippewa reservation. These novels detail the interconnecting lives of several generations” (Bennett, “A Review of Love Medicine” 112), spanning three generations and recording fifty years. They grow into a family of texts, and as long as the author is alive and continues to write, a period cannot be put to the story she is telling. According to Kroeber, Love Medicine, in contrast to many contemporary works, “is not a monologue” (2), it is dialogic for “We hear in it not only diverse voices but diverse languages—the speech-systems of different age groups, genders, occupations, modes of acculturation, political attitudes, religious commitments colliding, overlapping, intersecting, contradicting, fusing” (2).

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Some critics have argued that Love Medicine is a collection of short stories, not a novel – the bone of contention being “incoherence.” Schneider critiques Love Medicine as consisting of short stories “lacking in novelistic unity and overriding structure” (1). Yet she also speaks of coherence in this novel, a marriage of “structure and theme, style and content” regardless of “shifts in narrative style and a virtual cacophony of often individually unreliable narrative voices” (Schneider 1). The text is dialogic in the sense that “storytelling constitutes both theme and style” (Schneider 1). The elements of the novel are potentially autonomous stories. Erdrich connected them into a novel. According to Sands, it is “a narrative collage that seems to splice random margins of experience into a patchwork structure. Yet ultimately it is a novel, a . . . compassionate, and coherent narrative that uses sophisticated techniques toward traditional ends” (35). Technically and with regard to content, Love Medicine is both: a collection of short stories (published before in journals) and a novel. In accordance with Bakhtinian theories, I view the novel as a compost pile, a work-in-progress, never perfect and never complete. Love Medicine is thus a novel “of hard-edges, multiple voices, disjointed episodes, erratic tone shifts, bleak landscapes, eccentric characters, unresolved antagonisms, incomplete memories” (Sands 35). I would argue that, in correspondence with the internal dialogization Erdrich’s novels manifest, various narrative voices are bound to create a sense of incoherence. It is inevitable if the characters’ voices are to be individual, recognizable, not all’ unisono. Love Medicine commences with third-person narration suggesting objectivity and omniscience quickly thwarted by the multiple and sometimes conflicting voices telling sometimes overlapping stories: “The novel is built layer upon layer,” Sands observes (39), compost-pile like. Narrators in Love Medicine are related, by blood and otherwise, and so are their stories. Love Medicine consists of chapters in two modes: protagonistbound narration, told in the first person by six individuals: Albertine Johnson, Marie (Lazarre) Kashpaw, Nector Kashpaw, Lulu Lamartine, Lyman Lamartine, and Lipsha Morrissey; and of chapters in third-person narration. Certain situations reverberate throughout the novel and are narrated by different persons twice, sometimes three times. Chronology is left for the reader to construct. The chapters narrate events which happened in 1981, 1934, 1948, 1934, 1957, 1973, 1974, 1980, 1982, 1983, and 1985. The flashbacks and flash-forwards can give less attentive readers feelings of vertigo, whether they are narrated by protagonists or narrated as they are happening in the protagonists’ minds. This complex temporal structure

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shakes and alerts the reader, debunking the preconceived notions he or she has about novels and about the supposed linearity of time. Time in Erdrich’s novels is cyclical, events are repeated or repeatedly narrated, beginnings suggest endings and endings incite beginnings. The novel relies heavily on gossip which, as a narrative device, fills in, but only partly, the blanks left by the “elliptical nature of Erdrich’s novel” (Sands 37). In Love Medicine, it “affirms identity, provides information, and binds the absent to the family and the community” (Sands 37). Gossip, as unreliable as it appears, is a dialogue, works a tad like glue, tying together the loose strands of information, and providing a running commentary, a chorus-like explanation of the world. The novel depends on this unreliability incarnate. This text features “exaggeration, makes simple judgments . . . .It takes for its topic the events of history, memory, and the contemporary moment and mixes them into a collage of commentary on the group as a whole as well as the individual” (Sands 39-40). Instability being inherent to gossip, the story can only become clear once it is polyphonic: “with each teller limited by his or her own experience and circumstances. It is only from all the episodes, told by many individuals in random order, that the whole may be known” (Sands 37). The wholeness lies in the fragments put together. This novel questions the existence of one sole truth or one true version: “There is no single version of this story, no single tone, no consistent narrative style, no predictable pattern of development, because there is no single narrator who knows all the events and secrets” (Sands 37-38). Inconsistency can harbor potential, for example while granting parity: No one story is more important than any other; but each narrative has special significance for a specific context and listener . . . and a unique meaning in its proximity to other stories. Each story, like each individual, although complete in itself is reconnected to the whole through remembering and telling. (Wong, “Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine” 97)

Each narrative and each individual is separate yet inter—connected, in distinct proximity to others. The relationship is dialogic, open, and it allows for autonomy of its elements.

Tracks (1988) Tracks unofficially inaugurated Erdrich’s novelistic oeuvre and is the most overt example of re—cycling, literally re—using old parts, and adapting them for new purposes. According to the author,

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The novel is written almost entirely in chronological order, as is The Beet Queen (thematically belonging to another cluster). Stookey points out that “Each chapter is identified by year and by season, and the Ojibwe name of each season, or sun – qeezis – is printed first in the characters’ native tongue and then in English translation” (Stookey 70). Erdrich experiments with chronology and with how she marks the chapters, employing Ojibwe designations. Perhaps the chronological organization of the chapters is intended to help her disentangle that most problematic novel for her. Characters in Love Medicine do not always narrate the same events. Similarly in Tracks, narrations by Nanapush and Pauline alternate and directly enter into dialogue with each other. “We are shown how differently the various characters view the same facts. This technique can result in neutrality towards all characters,” Bal notes (152), but it does not have to. Pauline’s narration signals a mind which is eccentric and fanatical, and observant readers will not miss it, although they might initially be tempted to sympathize with her. Nanapush’s narration is very specific for he uses “we” to speak about the American Indians and “you” to talk to his adopted (not in a traditional sense of the word) daughter Lulu about earlier times, about saving Fleur’s, her mother’s life, about Father Damien saving their lives. Pauline uses a “we” as well, but it is not synonymous with Nanapush’s: it is ambiguous, it could refer to Ojibwes, or mixed-bloods, or whites, since Pauline is determined to shed her Indian provenance and to become white at whatever cost. I will return to Pauline later in the chapter. The story “comes up different every time, and has no ending, no beginning. They get the middle wrong too. They only know they don’t know anything” (T 31), Pauline says when it is her turn to speak in the book. She destabilizes the concept of a linear narrative. Even if the reader does not trust her as a narrator, this statement seems to hold water. Nanapush, the great storyteller, reflects on relationships and stories, and the relation between the two, while talking about Fleur: Since I saved her from the sickness, I was entangled with her. Not that I knew it at first. Only looking back is there a pattern. I was a vine of a wild grape that twined the timbers and drew them close. Or maybe I was a branch, coming from the Kashpaws, that lived long enough to touch the

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next tree over, which was Pillagers, of whom there were only two—Moses and Fleur—far cousins, related not so much by blood as by name and chance survival. Or maybe there was just me, Nanapush, in the thick as ever. There is a story to it the way there is a story to all, never visible while it is happening. Only after, when an old man sits dreaming and talking in his chair, the design springs clear. (T 34)

The metaphor of entanglement reverberates throughout the fabric of Erdrich’s narratives: tangled stories reflect tangled family relations. The compost pile is entanglement incarnate, everything is chaotic and everything is related, in contact and growing. The patterns to the story are not conspicuous at first, but become pronounced when thought about and narrated. The storytelling practice teases the stories from their hiding places.

Four Souls (2004) Four Souls is profoundly dialogic with Tracks. It is narrated contrapuntally by Nanapush (sometimes in the first-person singular, sometimes in firstperson plural) and Polly Elizabeth. Polly Elizabeth, John James Mauser’s wife’s sister, is initially an uptight and pretentious spinster. They narrate the actions of Fleur and speculate about her thoughts and motivations (she marries Mauser initially to enact revenge, then helps him). Nanapush weaves his narration of knowledge received and created: Sometimes an old man doesn’t know how he knows things. He can’t remember where knowledge came from. Sometimes it is clear. Fleur told me all about this part of her life some years after she lived it. For the rest, though, my long talks with Father Damien resulted in a history . . . .I pieced together the story of how it was formed . . . During those long conversations Father Damien and I exchanged rumours, word and speculation about Fleur’s life . . . Over endless games of cards or chess we amused ourselves by wondering about Fleur Pillager. (FS 4)

Nanapush admits he is not omniscient and thus strips himself of the absolute authority. What Fleur does not disclose, he talks into being during his conversations with Father Damien. Much of it can be pure speculation, which is often the case when it comes to Fleur’s (mis)adventures. No one version of the story exists, it is dialogic, for it can be told from multiple perspectives, sometimes even contradicting ones. In order to avenge the loss of her land Fleur initially plans to murder Mauser who cheated her out of it. Her plan is adjusted, and instead she marries him and bears him a son. Again Fleur is, as in Love Medicine,

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portrayed as a healer and an avenger. Her relationship with Mauser is strangely dialogic. She is hired in his house as a laundry woman, but realizing he suffers from paroxysms and paralysis, she heals him with her medicinal skills. Similarly, an unlikely bond is formed when Polly Elizabeth assists with Fleur’s birth, but not even that act of charity can prevent the child’s mental illness. In his youth, Mauser perpetrated much evil to Fleur’s people. Nanapush knows “[h]ow in his earliest days, handsome and clever, he had married young Ojibwe girls straight out of boarding school, applied their permits to log off the allotment lands they had inherited. Once their trees were gone he had abandoned his young wives, one after the next” (FS 23). Fleur plans to avenge his wrongdoings. The novel starts where Tracks finished. It is a second attempt to explain what happened to Fleur when she deserted her daughter Lulu and went to live in the city. That abandonment haunts the one long book. It is most often Nanapush who tries to narrate the story to Lulu and to elucidate Fleur’s reasons for this difficult decision. In The Last Report (2001) Lulu is bitter and reminisces on the only occasion in her life when she cried: “And why did she teach me all this tenderness, this love, if she then threw me in a pit? For that is what the school would be, and better if she slapped me from the first and taught me to be hard” (LR 243). Even a protagonist as balanced, as integral and close to Ojibwe tradition as Fleur, the medicine woman, makes grave mistakes and has to pay for them. Daughter and mother never enjoy a close relationship afterwards, but perhaps this long-awaited reconciliation could become the subject matter of future books by Erdrich? When she returns and wins back her land in a card game with an Indian agent, Fleur is exhausted, an alcoholic, in disarray. The novel ends with Fleur’s healing process as narrated not by Polly Elizabeth, or Nanapush, but by Margaret Rushes Bear, a mother-figure to Fleur. Margaret assists with the healing and gives her own medicine dress to Fleur, along with advice: All the power you were given and all the luck that drove you to the Cities, all the cruelty that lay in your heart toward those who wronged you, all the devotion to the land and to your stubborn idea comes to nothing before one truth—your first child does not love you and your second child doesn’t know how. How can they love a mother who forgot to guard their tenderness, and her own? How can they love a woman who can suffer anything and do anything? Forget your power and your strength. Let the dress kill you. Let the dress save you. Let yourself break down and need your boy and your girl. (FS 206)

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She breaks herself open, she is no longer arrogant, she does not test her luck and gamble anymore. She trans—forms and lives a quiet life. “Change is chaos and pain. There was no order in our making3” (FS 210), Nanapush says alluding to both her trans—formation and the adaptations Ojibwe have to undergo in contemporary times, “Once we were a people who left no tracks. Now we are different. We print ourselves deeply in earth. We build roads” (FS 210). Once Ojibwe did not have to own anything to survive, but in a postcolonial context, where “post” denotes continuity, if they do not adapt, then at least they need to start a dialogue.

The Bingo Palace (1994) Almost every other chapter of The Bingo Palace is narrated by Lipsha in the first person, alternating with chapters in third person, and an occasional we-narrator, “the collective perspective of the reservation’s community,” and “unlike the plots of the earlier novels, this plot unfolds within the passage of a single year” (Stookey 91). It is not altogether clear who the “we” is: sometimes ancestor spirits, mostly the community, watching, thinking, feeling, and talking. The novel commences and ends with the “we” narrator, i.e. the community gossiping. In the first chapter we watch Lulu through the eyes of the community she lives in. She is observed and we are voyeuristically following her steps on a day she decides to go to the post office and finds a wanted poster of her son Gerry Nanapush. She makes a copy of it, sends it to her grandson, Gerry’s son Lipsha, and steals the original. The “we” narrator knows there is a message in this incident: “We were curious to know more, even though we’d never grasp the whole of it . . . .We could pull any string from Lulu, anyway, it wouldn’t matter, it would all come out the same degree of tangle” (BP 5). The communal narrator acts as a commentator, a chorus reiterating what the readers know from Love Medicine, and what they might intuit about possible entanglements: Keep a hand on the frail rope. There’s a storm coming up, a blizzard. June Morrisey still walks through that sudden Easter snow. She was beautiful woman, much loved and very troubled. She left her son to die and left his father to the mercy of another woman and left her suitcase packed in her room to which the doorknob was missing. Her memory never was recovered except within the thoughts of her niece, Albertine—a Kashpaw, a Johnson, a little of everything, but free of nothing. (BP 5)

The “chorus” sees much and keeps an eye on the protagonists of this book: Lulu, Lipsha, Gerry, Shawnee, Albertine, Zelda, and Fleur. Yet its

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members are not omniscient, although they observe, eavesdrop, even have informants. They can admit to their frailty and highlight their strengths: “We don’t know how it will work out, come to pass, which is why we watch so hard, all of us alike, one arguing voice. We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try” (BP 6). They dispense advice to Lipsha, who they know is Fleur’s great-grandson and her potential successor in healing and medicine. But his comportment, his choices “disgust” them, for according to them, he wastes his talents: He tires us. We try to stand by him, to bring him back, give him advice. We tell him that he should ground himself, sit on the earth and bury his hands in the dirt and beg the Manitous. We have done so much for him and even so, the truth is, he has done nothing yet of wide importance. (BP 7)

They see him come home as well and this is where the new chapter in Lipsha’s life begins. The “we”-narration makes a circle and concludes the novel. The eyes follow Fleur when she embarks on the four-day road to Ojibwe afterlife. Here again, they admit their shortcomings: “our suspicion that there is more to be told, more than we know, more than can be caught in the sieve of our thinking” (BP 274). The collective voice does not pretend to know everything, it allows for gaps in knowledge to be filled in by other, individual protagonists of the community. Point of view or narrative voice is never single, never attributed to just one individual in any of the installments of Erdrich’s one long book. It is not confirmed how extensively Erdrich and Dorris co—worked on The Bingo Palace, but even if they did not, the legacy of their partnership is conspicuous: the dialogue continues inside the novel, between protagonists and their viewpoints, and within the series of the novels. The Bingo Palace tells inter—related, entangled stories about Lipsha Morrisey, Lyman Lamartine, Lulu Lamartine, and Shawnee Ray, with chapters tellingly entitled “Lipsha’s Luck,” “Lyman’s Luck,” “Shawnee’s Luck,” or “Shawnee’s Morning.” The chapter heading is slightly reminiscent of chapters in The Beet Queen titled “Mary’s Night,” for example. Having or lacking luck is a leitmotif in The Bingo Palace, a novel about gambling in a literal and metaphorical sense. The potential of gambling, “an ancient Ojibwa tradition” (Stookey 92), is harnessed under the guise of a bingo palace on reservation, and it heralds changes as well as it could be a dialogic stratagem “by which the culture ensures its own continuing survival” (Stookey 92). Just as we learned the story behind Fleur’s abandonment of Lulu in Tracks and Four Souls, so is June’s story, concerning her son Lipsha, re—

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told in The Bingo Palace. Erdrich frequently delays explanations, offers the other side to the stories. One or several books later she presents the story from another person’s vantage point, thus stretching the definition and scope of a novel. The Bingo Palace is also full of delayed love stories. Lipsha is courting Shawnee Ray who is technically engaged to Lyman, a father to her child. She wants to go to college before marrying and so their story is put on hold. Zelda, Nector’s daughter from Love Medicine, while having a heart attack (a stroke of fate?), realizes she still loves Xavier Toose, a medicine man she refused in her youth, marrying instead a white man. Thirty years later, she reconciles with the repressed knowledge and they reunite.

Tales of Burning Love (1996) Several characters from Erdrich’s previous novels make an appearance in the fifth novel, Tales of Burning Love, although Erdrich does not mention this title while talking about her “one long book.” It takes place in 1994 and 1995, with occasional flashbacks, and is mostly set in Fargo, North Dakota and in Argus. It contains stories within stories and Erdrich unravels many new angles to old stories in this novel. It commences with a different perspective on the story of last days of June and her encounter with “Andy,” who in fact is Jack Mauser. We learn they get married that same day. But June still leaves to walk back home and dies in the blizzard. Jack is married four more times. Trapped in a car during a blizzard (dialogic with June’s lethal stunt), his wives tell their stories in order to survive. The novel commences on Saturday before Easter Sunday in 1981, just as Love Medicine did. But this time it is narrated from the point of view of “Andy” who notices June and picks her up. We learn his side of the story, namely that he has a toothache and no insurance. “Andy” from Love Medicine is given a second chance. He no longer is a man in a bar who has an unsatisfactory sexual encounter with June. When his former wives tell of their marriages to Jack, he is made into a complex protagonist, no longer a one-dimensional character he was in Love Medicine. We learn he is haunted by the memory of June throughout his life and feels remorse he did not at least follow her: “He couldn’t hold on to a woman ever since he let the first one walk from his arms into Easter snow” (TBL 13). The book is also dialogic with The Beet Queen. Dot Adare, Mauser’s fifth wife, of Love Medicine, The Beet Queen and The Bingo Palace, makes an appearance in Tales of Burning Love. In addition to recurring characters, motifs are duplicated. Quennet observes that Dot was born during a blizzard in The Beet Queen. Erdrich’s “proclivity to use the same

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characters in her various novels creates a continuity and recognizability of her work that most novelists do not have,” Quennet points out (79). Gerry Nanapush surfaces, escaping from prison yet again, to meet with Dot and their daughter Shawn. Lyman Lamartine is presented as a potential business partner to Jack. New protagonists, Jack’s former wives, are introduced: Eleanor Schlick Mauser, Candice Pantamounty, and Marlis Cook Mauser. Sister Leopolda features prominently in the novel and is the object of Eleanor’s research on sainthood. The tales of burning love refer to Mauser’s wives’ tales of their marriage to him and are narrated in the first person. Only Dot does not relate her story in the car, we learn of it via third-person and first-person narration earlier in the novel. The regular narration is “interrupted” with radio bulletin, newspaper clippings, and correspondence. Marie Lazarre’s alleged stigmata (Love Medicine) are mentioned twice. Jude Miller writes to a bishop to inform him of a possible sainthood of Sister Leopolda, a theme foreshadowing his coming to the reservation to research it and his meeting with Father Damien in The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. The Painted Drum (2005) The novel introduces new contemporary protagonists, but links them with those known from previous books. Faye and Elsie Travers are related to Fleur and we learn the story of how Fleur’s mother, Anaquot, left her husband Shawano for Simon Jack Pillager. It is not clear how the Shawaanos of The Painted Drum are related to the Shawanos from The Antelope Wife. Geraldine and Judge are introduced and re—surface later in The Plague of Doves and become the protagonists of The Round House. The healing drum ties the stories of several families together. It is discovered by Faye while she is appraising a former agent’s belongings after his death. She re—appropriates it and brings it back to people it once belonged to. Bernard Shawaano’s grandfather made it years after Anaquot left him. The daughter she sacrificed to the wolves while she was leaving told Old Shawaano to make the drum and start the healing process. Years later the drum is in use again to aid Ira and her children. The drum brings people and families together across generations, but also ties the story together. One scene in The Painted Drum is painfully reminiscent of the opening episode of Love Medicine when June meets a man (“Andy”) in the bar, they attempt a sexual encounter in his car and she heads home in a blizzard and dies. Ira needs money for food and heat,

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and while her three children are at home, she scavenges bars looking for a man who will provide these goods. This could potentially end tragically for her, as it did for June. But she meets John who is sympathetic, at first buys her drinks, but then purchases groceries and drives her to his brother’s house. Morris drives her home and they find that the house is on fire, but she is soon relieved to find out her children are safe. It takes some time to nurture them back to health. They, along with their mother, need a healing ceremony. Morris and Ira plan to be together and create a home for her three children. They build a meaningful future together. Not every Native American woman has to end like June. In this respect The Painted Drum leaves the readers with a more positive message. This one long book consisting of seven novels is internally dialogic, it re—cycles protagonists, narrators, events, settings, and it re—writes certain episodes in order to equip the protagonists with second chances or agency to act and redeem themselves.

2. The Beet Queen and The Master Butchers Singing Club These two novels by Erdrich mostly tackle immigrant fates in America (the Kozka family) and thus both stand out from the previous cluster, and are dialogic with those novels mainly concerned with Native American lives in the twentieth and twenty-first century. Occasionally Ojibwe protagonists the reader may already be familiar with make an appearance in these two novels, notably Dot, Fleur, and Sister Leopolda. Thematic concerns are in dialogue with those of the one long book: families, relationships, and the complexities thereof. These themes remain the common denominator regardless of the protagonists’ race or ethnicity.

The Beet Queen (1986) Angela Carter claims The Beet Queen is woven of what classic American novels are made of: “small towns, the prairies, people trashed by circumstance, sexual obsession” (Carter 151). Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo) in her review of this novel titled “Here’s an Odd Artifact for the Fairy-Tale Shelf” berated its thematic and formal aspects: for being ambiguous about the protagonists’ identity, especially the Native Americans; and for being influenced by postmodern conventions, devoid of politics and history. It is clear however, that only Celestine and her halfbrother Russell are Ojibwe, while all other protagonists are Americans with Polish or German roots. Silko dismisses Erdrich’s stylistic aptitude,

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for the content is not militant enough, for Erdrich has written too mainstream a novel ignoring communal experiences in favor of individual states of characters. Regrettably, there has never been a resolution to this nor a sustained and documented dialogue between Silko and Erdrich about it. The Beet Queen is the most un-Native American novel in the series, yet it re—cycles the protagonists: Fleur, Sister Leopolda, Russell Kashpaw, as well as the place: Kozka’s meat shop the readers know from Love Medicine where Pauline and Fleur worked together. It takes place outside the reservation, in the fictitious town of Argus, North Dakota (GondorWiercioch 36). A two-page prelude of a third-person narration introduces briefly the story of two children Mary and Karl Adare recently left by their mother to fend for themselves. It is followed by first-person narrations by Mary Adare, Sita Kozka, Celestine Kashpaw, Karl Adare, and Wallace Pfeff. The novel concludes with Dot’s narration. Inter—woven throughout the text are chapters describing poignant insights and moments for the protagonists, titled “Karl’s Night,” “Wallace’s Night,” “Mary’s Night,” “Russell’s Night,” “Celestine’s Night,” “Sita’s Night,” depicting their complex interior lives. According to Stookey, Erdrich does not present an idealized small-town life and the characters are often ambivalent on purpose: Although the central characters often show themselves to be both selfish and foolish, for each of them there exists some passage in the book that palpably invites the sympathy or understanding of the reader. In several instances these passages can be found in the third-person interludes, where characters either confront their own demons or suddenly recognize some pattern in their lives. (Stookey 60)

This passage echoes the concept of “good life” and attests to the fact that Erdrich’s prose pleads for knowledge with love and compassion, since protagonists who at first sight seem unattractive and unlikable have inner lives which can redeem them in the eyes of readers. Protagonists are an odd array of people of ambivalent identities constituting a family: Sita, beautiful and neurotic, married twice, committed once; Mary, aware of being plain; Celestine, big, “handsome like a man” (BQ 67); her brother Russell, a war veteran; Wallace, a closeted gay, and Karl, a bisexual travelling salesman. Karl has an affair with Wallace; simultaneously he impregnates Celestine and Dot is born. They share responsibilities: women work and men work, women cook and men cook, women clean and men clean, and both raise Dot. Wallace assists with Celestine’s labor. Bonds between the characters are crucial and need not

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be biological ties. In the “Celestine’s Night,” Celestine wakes up and while watching her baby, she notices “a tiny white spider making its nest” (BQ 176) in Dot’s hair, “It moved so quickly that it seemed to vibrate, throwing out invisible strings and catching them, weaving its own tensile strand . . . .A web was forming, a complicated house, that Celestine could not bring herself to destroy” (BQ 176). Familial ties in the novel are like this web with “invisible strands,” for they are not always biological, not always logical and thus form “a complicated house” for Dot whose family does not adhere to a traditional Western model. She seems to have two mothers, three if we consider Wallace, and two fathers, or one if we do not count Wallace. Angela Carter claims Erdrich’s book is an uncanny portrait of daily lives in America. She claims it to be closely related to the earlier Love Medicine, neither a sequel nor a prequel but an overlap – some of the same characters appear, some of the same landscapes. There is very much the sense of one continuous story, or, rather, a continuous braided sequence of interlinked narratives, and no real reason why, now she has begun, she should ever stop. (Carter 152)

Carter captures the fluid essence of Erdrich’s writing, the one long book she is writing, and rightly observes that Erdrich makes use of a family saga, “a suitable form in which to describe the processes of history at work amongst and within ordinary people” (152).

The Master Butchers Singing Club (2003) The novel continues the logic of The Beet Queen insofar as it prioritizes white Americans of Polish and German heritage, and few Native Americans appear in it. It is also set in Argus, North Dakota. Pete Kozka’s meat shop is mentioned and a new set of protagonists is introduced: Delphine Watzka and her father Roy, Fidelis and Eva Waldvogel and their four sons, Mazarine Shimek and her family. Among Native Americans, we meet Cyprian Lazarre and Step-and-a-Half. I could locate no scathing review, similar to Silko’s of The Beet Queen, so perhaps by the time the novel was published, no one fretted over Erdrich’s occasional affinity to portray mostly non-Native American protagonists. The novel speaks dialogically to other novels in the series when tackling themes of human relationships, of bloodlines, hidden and overt, of troubled and conflicted as well as happy and devoted parenthood. The book is narrated in the third-person and told chronologically. The multiple-focus narrative, the plurality of protagonists whose lives and fates

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are followed throughout the novel, recompenses for the lack of dialogism on the narrative plain, when the story is told by an omniscient narrator.

3. The Plague of Doves (2008), The Round House (2012) and LaRose (2016) The Plague of Doves and The Round House can be considered dialogic with one another, for they not only share protagonists: Geraldine and Judge Antone Coutts, uncle Whitey, his girlfriend Sonja, the grandfather Mooshum, but also themes of justice and injustice perpetrated on tribal lands. Relationships remain at the center of these novels and in this respect they are dialogic with the previous two clusters. Father Travis from The Round House resurfaces in LaRose (Ogle). In terms of other protagonists and families, they are more overtly political, they bear little connection to the above-mentioned novels, and so will not be analyzed in this study. Also a detailed analysis of these three novels would merit another study. This cluster is different from Erdrich’s initial work, she harnesses thirdperson narration more often and it makes a huge difference to me as a reader.

Conclusion The selected novels addressed in this chapter constitute one long book (first cluster) and other books in the series (two remaining clusters) about family and also about home: coming home, leaving home, being at home, not having a home, yearning for it. Every book in the series concerns a journey and a return (Gondor-Wiercioch 118). It is considered a Native American theme, but also a universal one. The protagonists mostly leave home in order to find an alternative home or to come back in appreciation. In Love Medicine June walks back home, but dies eventually; Lipsha brings his mother and his father home; Zelda brings her philandering father Nector back home to her mother Marie; Albertine runs away from home when she is fifteen, later on she comes home for June’s funeral. In Tracks Lulu leaves unwillingly for the government school and later returns to the reservation; in The Beet Queen Karl and Dot leave Argus but come back realizing it is home; in The Bingo Palace Lipsha returns to the reservation from the city (Gondor-Wiercioch 118). Erdrich’s novels are thus intra—textual also when it comes to recurring motifs. Not every protagonist is granted the chance to tell her/his own story. June Kashpaw, Adelaide Adare, Fleur Pillager never receive the voice to explain their difficult decisions in the first person. It is often others who

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absolve them from their mistakes or judge them, or their deeds which speak for them. The publication of new novels which would amend this shortcoming would be welcome. By analyzing the narrative and thematic fabric of the components of one long book and other books in the series, I intended to corroborate the thesis that, in correspondence with the novel’s complex gestation, narrative entanglements, and perennial incompleteness as averred by Bakhtin, Erdrich’s novels re—write the genre by probing its boundaries and by capitalizing on the novel’s dialogism, i.e. its open-endedness, inclusiveness, and heterogeneity.

CHAPTER VI “EQUIVALENCE IN DIFFERENCE”? DIALOGIC ACTS OF TRANSLATION IN THE LAST REPORT ON THE MIRACLES AT LITTLE NO HORSE

The practice of translation can be viewed as a nexus between production, re—production and trans—formation. This chapter traces the metaphorics of translation as a dialogic exercise, as portrayed in Erdrich’s novel The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, the novel with which I commenced my analysis, thus coming full circle. I suggest a shift in conceptualizing the practice of translation: from that of imitation, reminiscent of colonial encounters, to that of an attempt at respectful trans—formation, assuming an agential situation of mutual forming and trans—forming. The word is enriched with a dash to emphasize the prefix replete with the possibility of voluntary dialogue, agency, and reciprocation. The meaning of the preposition “trans,” i.e. “across,” “beyond,” “through” signals inter—action. The dialogue between Native Americans and white male colonialists was anything but harmonious. It took place in the “contact zones,” a term coined by Mary Louise Pratt, denoting “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination – such as colonialism and slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today” (7). Encounters and relations “usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict” take place in the contact zones, yet they also sustain “co-presence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices” (Pratt 8). This chapter is in dialogue with the first chapter, which concerned the structural dialogism of the novel The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. Even if certain quotations and episodes are repeated, they are evoked for slightly different dialogic purposes: one being trans— formations of the novel and protagonist’s identity and the other, translation

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as trans—formation and inter—action between protagonists. The first chapter explored the multifacetedness and open-ended quality of the novel and its narrative fabric as paired with multiple metamorphoses of the dynamic protagonist Sister Cecilia/Agnes DeWitt/Father Damien. This concluding chapter foregrounds the protagonist’s dialogic acts of translation as a Catholic priest, a go-between living on a reservation. In addition to addressing Catholicism, the novel conveys Ojibwe lore. It re—presents important Ojibwe concerns and perspectives even though it mostly employs English to communicate them. This is a translation process aimed at white readers but perhaps it can have a wider appeal and reach out to other tribes and other nationalities. The text is not only about linguistic translation but also tries to translate the cultural knowledge. Sister Cecilia/Agnes DeWitt/Father Damien is a white person who believes in dialogue. I tackle translation thematically, as a dialogue: literally, as the process of translating from one language to another, and metaphorically, as a transfer of knowledge between individuals, by analyzing the dialogic gestures occurring in The Last Report. Translation’s alleged secondariness is debatable. Though chronologically preceded by the text in its source language, it is not merely reproducing or duplicating the text, and of a lesser quality, but re—producing it, i.e. producing a new version thereof, thus addressing a wider audience, re— distributing the text. Translation guarantees not only a re—birth, but also an afterlife. According to Naoki Sakai, it “is an instance of continuity in discontinuity” (13). Erdrich writes a saga-like string of novels and, in an ecological gesture, she provides continuity as she re—cycles protagonists, themes, settings, and events. Translations of her works continue that logic. Erdrich’s The Last Report in particular, and her oeuvre in general, engage in multifarious dialogic acts which are also translational, in the sense that they include literal translation between languages and metaphorical transfer of cultural knowledge between individuals. Her writing is, as I argued before, inter—generic and inter—lingual, inter— textual and intra—textual, inter—national, inter—faith, and inter—gender. In this chapter, I will try to demonstrate the inter—faith and inter— gender/trans—gender dialogisms and translations by referring to examples from the text and by spotlighting the two befriended protagonists: a nun who becomes a Catholic priest and “converts” to Ojibwe beliefs; and Nanapush, an Ojibwe elder who does not convert to Christianity. First, I need to establish a theoretical framework referring to the practice of translation.

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Theories of Translation By referring to the Jakobsonian “equivalence in difference” (146), or more appropriately, an attempt at such a constellation, as the pivotal quandary of translational practices and dialogic acts, in this chapter I will examine how the author strives for parity of experiences, with regard to religion in particular. I argue that a semblance of the “equivalence in difference” could be achieved as a corollary of the tripartite nature of the dialogue, Holquist’s “the thirdness of dialogue,” i.e. the relation between utterance and reply. In that vein, I think it will be productive to quote from Jacques Derrida’s seminal “Des Tours de Babel” and borrow his third term of translation. Derrida wonders why translation is always understood as a relation of two languages and never a relation of more than two. Derrida questions the dichotomous nature of translation, the battling twoness he ingeniously and punningly terms “the duel of languages” (198). He thus probes the limits of translation: all too often they treat the passing from one language to another and do not sufficiently consider the possibility for languages to be implicated more than two in a text. How is a text written in several languages at a time to be translated? How is the effect of plurality to be “rendered”? And what of translating with several languages at a time, will that be called translating? (Derrida 171)

His logic and questions could be applied to a two-fold textual situation: when a text is composed of multiple languages (applicable to most of Erdrich’s prose); and when translators decide to work by consulting translations in different languages (provided they know these languages) in an attempt to find the best solution when translating. In view of this evidence, the dichotomous nature of translation is artificial. The third understanding of translation I owe to Lydia Liu, who in her essay “The Question of Meaning-Value,” invoking Karl Marx’s theory of commodity exchange-value and Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of the sign, postulates that in order to ascertain an equivalence of values or meanings between two terms, a third term of adequation is ineluctable, a third thing, to use Marx’s words, which is neither one thing or another in the equation or relationship. In Marx’s theory it is the labor-time, in Saussure’s it is the relation between the signifier and the signified, the meaning (=the value) produced in the process. In Erdrich’s novel, I argue, it is the dialogic exchange as a process of meaning-making producing a valuable meaning or meaningful value. But what about the context and the power relations? Saussure, according to Liu,

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understands the proximity of political economy and linguistics as based on the shared notion of value and manifesting “a system of equivalence between things belonging to different orders” (Liu 25). If an economic transaction is dependent on value, and a linguistic transaction on the transfer of meaning, one could view translation as a transfer of economic and linguistic values, of meaning-value. Translation, a potentially possible and efficient transfer of meaningvalue, needs to be conceptualized anew “as a historical event” (Liu 15), a corollary of actual encounters between peoples and ideas, in the context of “a history of colonialism whose exploitation of exotic difference has erected major obstacles against a historical understanding of difference” (Liu 19), yet translation conceived of as respectful of difference. The issue of power-struggle is also significant, as one must take into consideration “the degree and magnitude of sacrifice that one language must make in order to achieve some level of commensurability with the other” (Liu 3435). In colonial circumstances, the exchange of meaning, or the meaning itself was imposed and sanctioned by law, sometimes by force. As Liu writes, “[t]his process of meaning-making is guaranteed by a colonial regime of knowledge that recognizes as value only that which can help reproduce the colonial relations of power” (Liu 35). The scenario of an unequal linguistic exchange is addressed and re— defined in Erdrich’s novel—the missionary is not a fanatic and the colonized is not a victim, instead a friendship blossoms from the perspective of Father Damien. It is reminiscent of a phenomenon Liu calls dialogically coauthoring, where both “the dominator and the dominated participate in the making of this miracle of universal communication but determine the outcome of such exchanges differently” (Liu 37) in circumstances of unequal exchange and unfavorable distribution of power. Can reciprocity be assured? Can hierarchies be overcome? Liu seeks a credible answer by using Baudrillard’s term: Translation need not guarantee the reciprocity of meaning between languages. Rather, it presents a reciprocal wager, a desire for meaning as value and a desire to speak across, even under least favorable conditions. The act of translation thus hypothesizes an exchange of equivalent signs and makes up that equivalence where there is none perceived as such. (34)

A reciprocal relationship cannot be safeguarded, as risk and gamble are always involved. Two different outcomes, or even more, are the result of translational practice and it can be treated as a possibility, with room for transition and malleability; or as an impossibility, too unstable to be treated seriously and professionally. All this is not to say that power and

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relationality in the dialogic context are not problematic, as I will try to demonstrate later. Translation transports more ambivalence than one can see with a naked eye, especially since translating a language is also translating a culture and there is little security that phenomena in one culture will have direct correspondences in another culture.

The Violence of Polarity vs. the Logic of Continuity and Trans—formation While elaborating on the practices of colonization, specifically “subjection/subjectification” (1) and the colonized being constructed via the praxis of translation, Tejaswini Niranjana posits that In forming a certain kind of subject, in presenting particular versions of the colonized, translation brings into being overarching concepts of reality and representation. These concepts . . . completely occlude the violence that accompanies the construction of the colonial subject. Translation thus produces strategies of containment. (2-3)

The colonial context with its “strategies of containment” affects both the colonized and also the colonizer, preordains their identities and roles. Translation was employed to perpetuate colonial domination, it contains as it fixes its stare: “In creating coherent and transparent texts and subjects, translation participates – across a range of discourses – in the fixing of colonized cultures, making them seem static and unchanging rather than historically constructed” (Niranjana 3). Positioned at the intersection of many epistemologies: political, economic and religious, translation, “a significant technology of colonial domination” (Niranjana 21) employs “strategies of containment” by defining the colonizer against the colonized in a binary logic of good/evil, which authorizes the colonial project and perpetuates asymmetrical relations. To study, to codify, to collect, to know—are all means to an end, namely to contain, to tame, to control: “The desire of colonial discourse to translate in order to contain . . . is evidenced in colonial-missionary efforts to compile grammars of ‘unknown’ languages” (Niranjana 34). To contain is to discontinue, but a sympathetic, reciprocal and agential translation-cum-wager could become “an instance of continuity in discontinuity” (Sakai 13) and ensure a future dialogue. I would argue that Erdrich, a post—colonial writer, in her novel aims to address and dismantle “strategies of containment” one associates with translation in colonial times, and the patterns and hierarchies it vows to perpetuate. I argue that when the main protagonist translates, s/he learns and is thus less judgmental, less coercive. Within the context of Erdrich’s

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novel, I view the supposedly polarized categories of “colonizer” and “colonized,” “author” and “translator,” “original” and “copy,” “us” and “them” as a part of a continuum, fluid categories complicating the clearcut boundaries they usually posit and desire to enact. I would like to aver that a different metaphorics of translation is at work in this text, namely one of trans—formation, the very notion of which interrogates the project of containment that colonialism endorses in order to control its putatively controllable subjects. Since the missionary is by definition perceived as a figure who exerts influence on the colonized in order to bring about a change, a conversion, the concept of trans— formation and sometimes lack thereof, is programmed into colonial encounters. Erdrich, however, constructs a sympathetic missionary who is subject to constant change while some of her/his subjects resist it successfully. Throughout this study, I am using the word “translation” in accordance with Niranjana’s logic: not just to indicate an interlingual process but to name an entire problematic. It is a set of questions, perhaps a “field,” charged with the force of all the terms used, even by the traditional discourse on translation, to name the problem, to translate translation. Translatio (Latin) and metapherein (Greek) at once suggest movement, disruption, displacement. (8)

Colonial relations create identities for both parties involved and dehistoricize them, hoping for them to remain stable, monolithic, and unchanged. The persona of Sister Cecilia/Agnes DeWitt/Father Damien defies and re— defines this pattern.

Sister Cecilia/Agnes DeWitt/Father Damien The protagonist of The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, Sister Cecilia/Agnes DeWitt/Father Damien, is one person referred to as s/he in this study, unless it is clear that it is Sister Cecilia or Agnes talking, thinking or acting, as it often borders on the impossible to draw a neat line when one of these personalities is acting, talking, feeling, or thinking. Her/his trans—formations—translations, shifts of the self—are often related to spatial movement. After all translatio is derived from transfero, to move. S/he moves from the convent, to the farm and then to the reservation; from a religious place, to lay surroundings. Finally s/he settles at the Catholic mission on a reservation, a place which merges the spiritual

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with the material. S/he mediates and translates between genders and between religions. According to Naoki Sakai, the translator, in order to be efficacious, hence sensitive to the equivalences in difference, “must be internally split and multiple, and devoid of a stable positionality . . . a subject in transit” (13). S/he epitomizes and embodies this perennial in-betweenness, and multiple shifts, often tectonic in their scope. The fact that Father Damien used to be a nun and an ordinary woman who loved a man interrogates the authority of one person and distributes it among three persons in the form of a continuum, not polarity. Does this tripartite persona re—interpret or translate the Christian Trinity? Father Damien Modeste jars with the figure of an overzealous Catholic missionary fixated upon converting the native population, because he does not believe in eternal guilt and damnation. S/he feels s/he is sent to the reservation “to accept and absorb” (LR 74) rather than proselytize and save. Had the original Father Damien not drowned, he would have become the notorious priest fighting avidly for the souls of Native Americans. Earlier in the novel Agnes meets “the original,” “a small, prunish, inquisitive man of middle age who had been called by his God, from a comfortable parish near Chicago, to missionize Indians” (LR 35). Their dialogue constitutes a series of misunderstandings, as the original Father Damien speaks the idiom of a conventional Catholic missionary deploying the imagery of the savage, trance and conversion, while Agnes does not. This harmful idiom has been perpetuated in every colonial context meant to justify the conquest: “missionaries and orientalists have fabricated powerful fictions about other cultures and their languages” (Liu 19). It is a discourse based on exaggeration, fear and prejudice, a prescribed scenario of a colonial encounter, a double-edged sword: essentializing and injurious to the other as it was to the self. Noticing Agnes’s low spirits after her lover’s death, the original Father Damien assumes equivalence in sameness, in other words that everyone is like himself and would derive pleasure from similar deeds. In order to improve Agnes’ spirits, he narrates his undertaking with enthusiasm, “his zeal” (LR 35). When he elaborates on evil and rhapsodizes on “the deep need for my service” (35), he is interrupted by Agnes: What do you know of evil? . . . .I’ve seen evil . . . .It has blue eyes and brown shoes. About size ten. The feet are narrow. The hands are square. The build is slight and I’d say the face, though not handsome, has an intriguing changeability about it. Though I am only now repossessing my memory of all the specifics, Father Modeste, I’ve seen the devil himself and he was disguised in a rumpled cassock. (LR 35)

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She alludes to the Actor, the criminal who assumes many disguises, robs banks and killed Agnes’s lover Berndt. She also implicitly comments on the questionable agenda of white Catholic priests (“blue eyes”) who come to reservations disrespectful of foreign culture and beliefs, and to convert American Indians. When she mentions Chopin, a source of consolation to her, the original Father Damien retorts: “Miss DeWitt, it is said that God often enters the dark mind of the savage via musical pathways” (LR 36). Is Father Damien implicitly associating Agnes with the “savage Indian”? What are the implications? A case of containment occurs when the original Father Damien invokes translations of hymns into Ojibwe as evidence of his complete knowledge of the colonized: “I’ve studied translations of the hymns laid down in Ojibwe by our studious Father Hugo” (LR 36). Agnes further mocks him and exposes his ignorance of Native Americans: Aren’t you afraid? . . . .And what grave difficulties such a pious man as yourself will face when confronted with their shamans and hocus-pocus! I am sure they indulge in séances . . . Trance states, those are probably common. And potions, elixirs, that sort of anodyne . . . There are so many shapes to the evil you will have to contend with. They have, some of them, a tradition of devouring strangers! (LR 37)

In this reverse lecture, she mocks his insecurities, feeding the original Father Damien’s prejudices and fears, until he feels his integrity (or his feeble courage?) threatened and he suddenly remembers that he needs to be on his way. Agnes inflames Father’s anxiety of being potentially the only “civilized” person among natives with assumed cannibalistic tendencies. It is very often the case that American Indian literature teases out the presuppositions and stereotypes, an “exoticized foreknowledge” (Treuer, Native American Fiction 25), nestled in the reader’s mind, thus triggering expectations, and a subsequent fulfillment or frustration thereof. This foreknowledge precedes and can determine the reading experience. Treuer voices concerns with how this literature is interpreted and what meanings are constructed in the process. While reading Louise Erdrich, or any other author labeled American Indian, “[m]odern readers, no doubt, feel as though they are receiving cultural treasures, some kind of artifact or sensibility that, if they are non-Indian, is different from their own and, if they are Indian, is a part of their tribal patrimony” (Treuer, Native American Fiction 31). The original Father Damien’s “exoticized foreknowledge” probably stems from texts and stories demonizing indigenous peoples. Erdrich instead of merely re—writing, re—producing,

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re—imagining, produces another original of a Catholic priest while interrogating history of colonial encounters. S/he is not a “model” Christian missionary devoted unquestioningly to converting “the heathens.” Her/his methods are not violent, in fact instead of violating the spiritual identity of her charges by converting them, s/he adapts to their beliefs. This is an agential act of translation, it empowers her/him and her/his parish members as well. It is a win-win situation for both parties entangled in this situation of potentially unequal power relations. S/he articulates her/his philosophy of life in a conversation with a fellow priest: “ ‘The mixture is gray . . . .I have never seen the truth,’ said Damien, ‘without crossing my eyes. Life is crazy’ ” (LR 134-135). How does the “grayness” of truth in the new Father Damien’s eyes affect the polarities of colonial translation? If black/white continuity can be portrayed as gray, what would right/wrong look like? Like her/him? S/he makes understanding life and people her/his lifetime goal, s/he does not settle for straight, simple and stable answers. Her/his views on conversion are almost blasphemous from the vantage point of Christianity: “conversion . . . a most ticklish concept and a most loving form of destruction. I’ve not come to terms with the notion even now, in my age” (LR 55). Non-believers were converted to Christianity in a belief that their souls would be salvaged from eternal damnation. This ethnocentric practice, the tender violence or “a most loving form of destruction,” was imposed and sanctioned in colonial contexts; it was most often justified by the economic motives for conquest. The protagonist’s is not a Western understanding of Christianity, but an eclectic spiritual code merging Catholicism and Native beliefs and converging in a stance of humanity and tolerance. However, what is missing from the novel are Ojibwe evaluations of his/her conduct. In part of the novel, tellingly titled “The Deadly Conversions,” Sister Hildegarde Anne, in a moment of containment, coaxes Father Damien to baptize and convert the Indians with increased efficiency as “[t]he poor Indians are dying out. Now is a good time to convert them! . . . .They just sit patiently, singing, drumming, and prepare to get sick. You could easily baptize them while they’re tranced” (LR 71). Sister slyly calculates how many souls could be converted and how easy it would be to christen them. Partially obeying, s/he decides to go see them and becomes acquainted with Nanapush, or in the words of Sister Hildegarde: “a stubborn, crafty, talkative sort, much resistant to conversion” and Fleur “[t]ruly the daughter of Satan, so they say. The two of them . . . are rumored to have special powers” (LR 73). S/he enters their cabin and brings them back

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from the Ojibwe four-day road to death. S/he is met with initial hostility on Fleur’s part, for a reason: She hated priests. The priests had brought the sickness long ago in the hems of their black gowns, in their sleeves, in the water they flung on people to make them holy but which might as well have burned holes in their skin . . . What was it that made the black robes desperate to gather up the spirits of the Anishinaabeg for their god? (LR 81)

Alluding to the white settlers who brought numerous diseases with them when they came to colonize America, Fleur is suspicious of white men fixated on converting American Indians to alien beliefs. Asked by Kashpaw, another Ojibwe elder, why s/he believes in God and follows Jesus Christ, s/he answers: “Love” (LR 99). Yet to forge an exact or even approximate equivalence in difference verges on the impossible: In the Ojibwe language the word does not exist in the same sense—there is love out of pity, love out of kindness, love that is specific to situations or the world of stones, which are alive and called our grandfathers. There is also the stingy and greedy love that white people call romantic love. This love of Christ, this love that chose Agnes and forced her to give up her nature as a woman, forced Father Damien to appear to sacrifice the pleasures of manhood, was impossible to define in Ojibwe. (LR 99)

Translation is hindered in this context, but dialogue is not, despite the incommensurability of experiences. The phenomenon can be described, but might not be understood and hence the cultural transfer might not be realized. Jakobson distinguishes three forms of translation: intralingual (“rewording”), interlingual (“translation proper”), and intersemiotic (“transmutation”) (145). In the light of the above quote how to translate the untranslatable as one cannot use the exact same word, nor a synonym or a circumlocution, how to trans—mute meaning into an equivalent meaning in a different code? It can be done in a more complex and longterm dialogic transfer; just as Father Damien acts as an interpreter, assuming a mutual translatability on some level channeled during acts of inter—personal and inter—cultural communication. Her/his mission is “to help, assist, comfort and aid, spiritually sustain, and advise the Anishinaabeg. Not the other way around” (LR 214). In a moment of disintegration, when s/he decides to end her nurturing relationship with Father Gregory Wekkle, the scenario changes and s/he accepts it. Nanapush, who recognizes the state of grief s/he is in, sets up a

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sweat lodge and translates: “This is our church” (LR 214). At first reluctant, then s/he submits to Nanapush’s healing practices: Hunched in the pole hut and sitting upon bare tamped ground, Agnes at first smiled wanly at the irony. But once the flap was closed and the darkness was complete, once the glowing rocks were splashed with water, then sprinkled with sharp medicines that gave off a healing smoke, once Nanapush started to pray, addressing the creator of things and all beings to every direction and every animal, Agnes knew that Nanapush had spoken truthfully and without double wit, and that this was indeed her friend’s true church, which held him close upon the earth and intimate with fire, with water, with the heated air that cleaned their lungs, with the earth below them, and with the eagle’s nest of the sweat lodge over them. (LR 215)

S/he feels at home and at peace, once the hierarchies and analytical thinking are put aside, for while experiencing the spiritual and the numinous none of the tools of rational thinking are of importance and only the human being and her/his well-being matters: According to Church doctrine, it was wrong for a priest to undertake God’s worship in so alien a place. Was it more wrong, yet, to feel suddenly at peace? . . . .After returning from despair, Father Damien loved not only the people but also the very thingness of the world . . . her salvation composed of the very great and very small. The vast comfort of a God who comforted her in a language other than her own. The bread of life. (LR 215-216)

It is interesting to note the instability of pronouns and identities in this passage while s/he experiences a [comm]union with non-Christian spirituality in a historical context when hierarchies and epistemologies were preordained, since s/he does not subscribe to that order of colonial relations and creates a context cut out for her/his own idiosyncratic spiritual needs.

Nanapush Nanapush, based on “the mythic Ojibwe Nanaabozho” (Hafen 92), an elder of great sovereignty and of a generous sense of humor, practices traditional Ojibwe spirituality, and can be nevertheless sometimes seen at church, mostly in order to please his friend Father Damien. A humorous scene occurs when Nanapush complains to him: “These benches are a hardship for an old man,” I complained. “If you had spread them with soft pine-needle cushions, I’d have come before.” . . . .

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“You must think of their unyielding surfaces as helpful,” he offered. “God sometimes enters the soul through the humblest parts of our anatomies, if they are sensitized to suffering.” “A god who enters through the rear door,” I countered, “is no better than a thief.” (T 110)

Lulu naps in church, while Nanapush muses: “Your eyes glazed over and you dozed. I felt no great presence either, and decided that the old gods were better, the Anishinabe characters who were not exactly perfect but at least did not require sitting on hard planks” (T 110). Nanapush is not only a trickster with a tendency for excess, but also “a born storyteller who works to preserve the land, language and heritage of the traditional Ojibwe” (Hafen 92). Like his namesake Nanabozho, he acts the role of an intermediary between his people and ancestral spirits. He does not convert to Catholicism, even in the face of crisis. He remains tolerant without having to undergo trans—formations. But what of power-struggles inherent in the conversion and translation, the colonizer and colonized context?

Translation and Warfare Scholars have observed a link between warfare and translation, as Lawrence Venuti argues “translations enact a process of identity formation in which colonizer and colonized . . . are positioned unequally” (“Globalization” 165). Emily Apter speaks of the translation zone as a “military zone, governed by the laws of hostility and hospitality, by semantic transfers and treaties” (9). Vicente Rafael notes a semantic correlation between the Spanish words for “conquest,” “conversion,” and “translation” (Contracting Colonialism xvii), as acts of winning over, persuading to succumb and change, as processes of “crossing over into the domain – territorial, emotional, religious, or cultural – of someone else and claiming it as one’s own” (xvii). Indeed, Rafael observes, “to translate” is synonymous in Spanish with “to convert” (Contracting xvii). This translates into annexing the territories and re—channeling the energies and desires of the colonized (Rafael xvii). Or, as he ingeniously describes the circuit of power: “In the Philippine case, the experience of nationhood was . . . inseparable from the hosting of a foreign presence to which one invariably finds oneself held hostage” (The Promise xviii). In a strange logic the hosted holds hostage. In stark and surprising opposition to colonialism’s adult calculations, the logic of colonialism is very “childish” insofar as the colonized is expected to unquestioningly submit to the needs and wishes of the colonizer, the spoiled child that will wail and strike if one does not comply. Erdrich

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constructs Father Damien as a mature individual devoted to the welfare (not warfare) of fellow human beings and questioning the logic of conversion, conquest, and translation. While praying, s/he voices doubts and anxieties triggered by the asymmetrical hierarchies of colonialism: “The priest stopped what he was doing, cast himself down, made himself transparent, broke himself open. That is prayed” (LR 182). The prayer becomes a matter of opening oneself to the possibility of one’s own dissolution, perhaps even one’s conversion into otherness: “He prayed, uneasily, for the conversion of Nanapush, then prayed for his own enlightenment in case converting Nanapush was a mistake” (LR 182). The idiosyncratic character of this prayer is problematic – it is a monologue addressed to Christian God, it is implicitly dialogic, for an answer, even if not immediate, is expected, or hoped for. At first it was critical to convert Nanapush, a daunting task undertaken by Father Damien’s predecessor and lamented by the nuns whose mass wine Nanapush would from time to time imbibe. Defying the logic of colonialism by which the colonized needs to imitate the colonizer, s/he wonders whether s/he is apprenticed with the appropriate task since Nanapush becomes more than a friend, against the patterns of conquest played out along the supposedly impermeable lines of us/them dichotomy: Of course I loved Nanapush . . . .The Old man was my teacher, my confidant, my priest’s priest, my confessor, my friend . . . .There is no one I want to visit except in the Ojibwe heaven, and so at this late age I’m going to convert . . . and become at long last the pagan that I always was at heart. (LR 310)

It is apparent that Nanapush becomes more than a friend to her/him. Instead of soliciting imitation, s/he camouflages as a man in order to attain her/his goals. Instead of eradicating difference, s/he enacts it. The colonial logic is reversed here, resemblance is not required of the other. Shapeshiftings take place in the main protagonist as well as in the relations between colonizers and colonized, and are facilitated by dialogic and translational processes which operate: as a telecommunicative medium offering the promise of communication at great distances and the prospect of bridging what had seemed unbridgeable. Such a promise makes conceivable all sorts of affiliations, collaborations, and even friendships between and among colonizers and colonized, even as it raises the possibility for misunderstanding, misrecognition, and conflict. (Rafael, “Translation in Wartime” 242)

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Not every dialogic and translational context is bound to result in understanding and mutual recognition of cultural knowledge. The promise is underscored, even if the consequence is more ambiguous and less satisfactory than one would wish for. A marvelous moment of humor and translation, destabilizing colonial hierarchies and the logic of warfare, occurs between Father Damien and Nanapush when they lead their endless dialogues on the nature of things: “The two spoke of all there was to know. And although it was in English, during the talk itself Nanapush taught language to Father Damien, who took out a small bound notebook and recorded words and sentences” (LR 222). During their talks about everything, Ojibwe language instruction is effortlessly exercised.

The Language of Music One of the subjects of their dialogues turns out to be music: “In common, they now had the love of music, though their definition of what composed music was dissimilar” (LR 222). Erdrich introduces music, as yet another language they can communicate in, thus tinkering with the vertical hierarchy in favor of a horizontality of experiences. This is how s/he translates the music s/he knows best, that of Chopin, to Nanapush: “When you hear Chopin,” Father Damien asserted, “you find yourself traveling into your childhood, then past that, into a time before you were born, when you were nothing, when the only truths you knew were sounds.” “Ayiih! Tell me, does this Chopin know love songs? I have a few I don’t sing unless I mean for sure to capture my woman.” “This Chopin makes songs so beautiful your knees shake. Dogs cry. The trees moan. Your thoughts fly up nowhere. You can’t think. You become flooded in the heart.” “Powerful. Powerful. This Chopin,” asked Nanapush, “does he have a drum?” “No,” said Damien, “he uses a piano.” (LR 222)

Is this scene one of translatability, of incommensurability, or of equivalence in difference? In this ingenious, reciprocal and co—authored moment of translation, of cultural transfer, slightly reminiscent of a barter talk, the meaning-value is negotiated and agreed upon, equivalence in difference is ascertained by the currency of a meaningful and respectful dialogue on a subject close to both protagonists’ hearts.

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The way s/he plays the piano is reminiscent of mystical, sensuous experiences of Teresa of Avila. An audience gathers to hear her/him play, an audience of snakes: “The rhapsody woke them, Debussy drew them forth, Chopin made them listen, and Schubert put them back to sleep . . . .There were at least a hundred” (LR 219). S/he even rehearses the sermons in the presence of serpents. The significance of this episode is pivotal, as snakes evoke the spirit of trans—formation while they shed skin, and as s/he is undergoing internal shifts and struggles. Nanapush expresses approval of Damien’s snake audience: this was a sign of great positive concern among the old people, for the snake was a deeply intelligent secretive being, and knew all the cold and blessed spirits who lived under stone and deep in earth. And it was the great snake, wrapped around the center of the earth, who kept things from flying apart. After the snakes, Damien was gratified to find that he was consulted more often and trusted with intimate knowledge. Perhaps he was considered to have acquired a very powerful guardian spirit, or perhaps it was the piano. (LR 220-221)

Her/his music also attracts people. Instead of sermons s/he begins to deliver concerts, thus proving the spiritual potential of music. Father Damien effectively substitutes, or more appropriately complements, religion with music. A wave of baptisms follows, as his parish members are convinced of and grateful for a tangible proof of Father Damien’s connection to their gods and ancestors. They are not necessarily persuaded by the importance of becoming Catholic, but in a gesture of gratitude want to return the favor and please the priest. Jakobson’s concept of intersemiotic translation, or transmutation, denotes “an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems” (145). Thus, it can be said that while s/he is playing the piano, s/he translates the untranslatable: her/his mixed feelings and ambivalences into music. Trans—mutation, a dialogic form of a cultural translation, “substitutes messages in one language not for separate codeunits but for entire messages in some other language . . . the translator recodes and transmits a message received from another source. Thus translation involves two equivalent messages in two different codes” (Jakobson 146). Jakobson claims that by default poetry is untranslatable: “Only creative transposition is possible” under the guise of the intersemiotic translation “from one system of signs into another, e.g., from verbal art into music, dance, cinema, or painting” (151). Perhaps, in view of this, religion and spirituality can only be rendered understandable by means of a different language, different code, e.g. music.

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Translation and Decolonization Translation in the postcolonial context, according to Douglas Robinson, has three “sequential but overlapping” roles, pertaining to the past, present, and the future: it is “a channel of colonization,” “a lightning-rod for cultural inequalities continuing after the collapse of colonialism,” and “a channel of decolonization” (31). In numerous acts of translation which epitomize the third function, s/he tries to forge permeability, even complementarity of religions, even if her/his loyalties ought to be uniform, monolithic, or as P. Jane Hafen posits: “Father Damien becomes the intersection of the organized religion and the spiritual lives of his Ojibwe parishioners” (82). In a letter to the Pope, s/he thus summarizes her/his accomplishments—the seven good deeds (the Catholic seven virtues with a twist?)—s/he managed to perform while living on the reservation in order to mitigate the dubious consequences Western conquest and conversion entail: Number one: I have vanquished the devil, who has come to me in the form of a black dog. I have also contained, discharged, influenced, and negated the dangerous pieties of a nun [Sister Leopolda] of questionable allegiance . . . .Two: I have caused there to be cleanly disposal of wastes that threatened the health of our parish. I have made improvements in the style, location, and comfort of the venerable institution known as the outhouse. Three: I have introduced the wholesome peanut to the diet of the indigenes. Four: I have willingly exchanged my prospects for eternal joy in return for the salvation of the soul of one of the more troublesome of my charges (who loves me but who doesn’t in the least appreciate my sacrifice). Five: In resolving a specific injustice levied by the ignorance of government officials, I have assisted in attempting to add twelve townships to the tribal land base. (LR 49)

Father Damien’s deeds are laudable, for s/he is not fixated on converting to Catholic religion, but concerned with the well-being of her/his charges. In a poignant moment of cultural translation. s/he intimates: Six: Although my mind is a tissue of holes, I have learned something of the formidable language of my people, and translated catechism as well as specific teachings. I have also rendered into English certain points of their own philosophy that illuminate the precious being of the Holy Ghost. Seven: I have discovered an unlikely truth that may interest Your Holiness. The ordinary as well as esoteric forms of worship engaged in by the Ojibwe are sound, even compatible with the teachings of Christ. (LR 49)

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Despite the efforts to promote dialogue, the qualifying word “compatible with” expresses a veiled colonial desire, “the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other” (Bhabha 122) characteristic of asymmetrical power relations. S/he is, alas, not entirely free of ethnocentric assumptions. Hafen claims this “accommodation undercuts the hierarchy and authority of the Catholic Church, but does not displace it,” however, “the colonizing power of Christianity is diffused by the transformation of Father Damien” (83). Taking his cue from Richard Jacquemond’s article “Translation and Cultural Hegemony: The Case of French-Arabic Translation” (1992), Robinson distills four hypotheses: “a dominated culture will be represented in a hegemonic culture by translations that are (1) far fewer in number than their counterparts in the opposite direction, (2) perceived as difficult and only of interest to specialists, (3) chosen for their conformity to hegemonic stereotypes, and (4) often written specifically with an eye to conforming to those stereotypes and thus getting translated and read in the hegemonic culture” (32). Erdrich locates a promise in the dialogic act of translation, namely of disseminating Ojibwe texts among the colonizers, even if in the end the equivalence in difference is not entirely realized and the word order suggests the familiar hegemony: “The ordinary as well as esoteric forms of worship engaged in by the Ojibwe are sound, even compatible with the teachings of Christ” (LR 49). Kashpaw’s wife, Mashkiigikwe asks: “Why do the chimookomanag [white people] want us?’ . . . .They take all that makes us Anishinaabeg. Everything about us. First our land, then our trees. Now husbands, our wives, our children, our souls. Why do they want to capture every bit?” (LR 100). Father Damien’s idiosyncratic mission contradicts Mashkiigikwe’s impression of missionaries, for s/he does not fight for their souls but does fight e.g. for their land with them. Her/his is not a peremptory proselytizing for s/he acknowledges and allows flaws and frailties without immediately condemning and referring to the hell-heaven discourse present in Christianity. As a Catholic priest, s/he is supposed to forgive on a daily basis and during the act of confession, but instead is forgiven by Nanapush “with great kindness for wronging him and all of the people he had wanted to help, forgiven him for stealing so many souls” (LR 309-310). Erdrich reverses the colonial structure, and it is the colonized who forgives the representative of the colonizing power which wrought so much destruction, material and spiritual to people who were not in a belligerent mode.

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Translation and Conversion Niranjana maintains that “Missionaries . . . functioned as colonial agents in the formation of practices of subjectification, not only in their roles as priests and teachers but also in the capacity of linguists, grammarians, and translators” (34). In the Philippines “Spanish priests delivered sermons in Tagalog to convert indigenous population. Translation enabled conversion and colonization simultaneously” (Venuti 166). In Erdrich’s novel, however, the trope of the monstrous missionary obsessed with the need to convert the “natives” and to perpetuate colonial practice is written anew. Indeed, the re—written trope aims to question the trinity of conquest, translation, and conversion as synonyms or corollaries. The Spanish missionaries in the Philippines, as described in Rafael’s Contracting Colonialism, did what most missionaries would do: “Confronted by the task of ‘dominating’ the languages of the natives, they wrote and read grammar books and dictionaries that would provide them with means of communicating the authority of God and king” (26). They studied the language and translated from Tagalog into English and English to Tagalog. Father Damien first studies Ojibwe and translates English catechism into Ojibwe language. Then s/he translates Ojibwe philosophy into English. The nexus between language and colonial politics, enlisting translated texts, such as the Bible, as tools to convert and conquer, gains a new dimension when s/he translates Ojibwe texts into English in a gesture of reciprocity, or equivalence, or assuming, to use Niranjana’s term, a “transparency of representation” (13). Erdrich says “English is a very powerful language, a colonizer’s language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures—its cruelty is its vitality” (Halliday 2010). Venuti posits that Christian missionaries “typically composed dictionaries, grammars, and orthographies for indigenous languages and then set about translating religious and legal texts into them” (165). The Bible was usually the first text to be translated into a native language, distributed among the natives in what was seen as a generous gesture, and employed as a tool of colonial violence, i.e. of conversion. Her/his mission is subverted and the fantasy of exotic difference nestled in the Other is thwarted, thus introducing an attempt at parity and dialogue where before there was none. Even if s/he sometimes acts according to the logic of colonialism, the discourse of “improvement,” of educating and civilizing, and sees the need to translate, in due course s/he rebels against it and acts in accordance with her/his own principles. Hafen asserts that the “literary reinterpretation of religious institutions is part of Erdrich’s process of decolonization” (82). The figure of Sister

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Cecilia/Agnes DeWitt/Father Damien is an intervention a literary text can enact on history, a strategy to question, re—write, and exorcise the colonial past with its polarizing logic and to peacefully and without bloodshed tamper with the collusion of conquest, translation, and conversion.

Conclusion The protagonist of Erdrich’s novel embodies thus a triple irony with regard to her/his instability, transitoriness, and translational praxis: since the Catholics converted the Ojibwes; since only men are priests, since the original is associated with male and the translation with female. Translation and its possible failures and fallacies, its putative inferiority as a copy, a reproduction, are associated with women: the femininity of translation is a persistent historical trope . . . .The hierarchical authority of the original over the reproduction is linked with imagery of masculine and feminine; the original is considered the strong generative male, the translation the weaker and derivative female. (Simon 1)

In light of the analysis of the protagonist, I proposed a new metaphor pertaining to translation, one less hierarchical, less judgmental and more agential: namely, that of trans—formation, of re—creation. Ann Rayson states, “Erdrich and Dorris achieve in their work a mingling of the male-female voice and a confluence of white-Indian culture. That their writing has entered the canon and not remained on its margin is a tribute to their ability to translate the Indian side of their experience for the dominant culture” (Rayson 31). I argue it is not a confluence, but dialogism between white and Native American cultures in Erdrich’s work. Erdrich, not only a master storyteller, but also a master translator, aims for parity while translating and mediating between religious/spiritual and gender discourses, not engaging in an original/copy binarism, but rather seeking equivalence in multiple differences. Equivalence in translation, according to Simon, cannot be a one-to-one proposition. The process of translation must be seen as a fluid production of meaning, similar to other kinds of writing. The hierarchy of writing roles, like gender identities, is increasingly to be recognized as mobile and performative. The interstitial now becomes the focus of investigation, the polarized extremes abandoned. (12)

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Instead of applying dichotomous categories, I suggest that scholars and readers perceive text and translation as part and parcel of a continuum, bearing in mind the Benjaminian proposition that translation ensures an afterlife of the original. These two protagonists, Nanapush and Sister Cecilia/Agnes DeWitt/Father Damien, members of different religious and spiritual groups, act as translators who alleviate the violence of colonialism and conversion, resisting the homogenizing operations thereof and endorsing the heterogeneity of languages and religion/spirituality. In an attempt to re—write the metaphorics of warfare and violence, I side with Susan Bassnett’s proposition for an “orgasmic” theory of translation: a process and outcome composed of “elements [which] are fused into a new whole in an encounter that is mutual, pleasurable and respectful” (qtd. in Simon 13), an encounter very much like that between Sister Cecilia/Agnes DeWitt/Father Damien and Nanapush. This chapter meant to complicate the notion of dialogism and to show translation as a dialogic traffic in texts, cultures, religions, spiritualities, as epitomized by the surprising friendship between the two protagonists from Louise Erdrich’s novel.

CODA

This study’s aim was to portray how Louise Erdrich extends Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogism and the novel by investigating her selected works as well as her practice of writing, co—writing, re—writing and reading novels. Erdrich’s version of dialogism is much more comprehensive than what Bakhtin initially proposed. Erdrich’s hallmark dialogic literary style and practice of inter—connectedness encompass, for example, writing a series of books; re—cycling protagonists, narrators, events, themes and settings; re—writing previously published novels; employing heteroglossia and polyglossia; co—authoring texts, blogging about books, translating different epistemologies for different audiences, and spotlighting families as the main thematic concern in dialogue with her own parenting experiences as described in her memoirs. Louise Erdrich re—defines Bakhtin’s theories of the novel. She writes a growing series of novels, compost pile-like, capitalizing on former novels as well as adding new elements and stories in the process. The compost pile stands for the continuity and trans—formation and is thus reminiscent of oral storytelling. Erdrich’s novels focus on multiple protagonists and characters, presenting a heteroglot and polyglot vision of reality. Different narrators abound in Erdrich’s prose and often differ in their perceptions which makes the communal story they tell more compelling, more dialogic, more polyphonic. By instilling the novels with oral quality, Erdrich makes her novelistic writing dialogic with Ojibwe tradition. The books she publishes are in temporary storage, they are subject to change, in dialogue with her amended artistic vision, with her readers’ and critics’ views. By experimenting with the qualities of openendedness and malleability, she probes and re—writes the restrictions of the novel as a genre. Erdrich creates a dialogic intra—textual microcosm replete with characters, places, and events. There is not an assigned order in which the novels should be read. Much agency is attributed to the readers. In Erdrich’s texts, oftentimes the story is not stable, not one. The same episodes are narrated by different narrators, sometimes in different moments in the same novels, sometimes in different novels. The resulting story is also contingent on the reader for the fabula, “a memory trace,” is a unique reading experience, not only because every person’s memory

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works differently, but also because it depends on the reader’s order of reading the novels and a resulting construction of the narrative reality emerging from Erdrich’s novels. Her literary universe has an unfinished and dialogic quality, not every story has been told yet. Recalcitrant towards notions of finality and completion, Erdrich suffuses her writing with an incessant quality of changing and becoming. Her novels resist closure, protagonists return and demand attention and the author answers dialogically by penning new tales. Erdrich wrote some of her novels in close co—operation and dialogue with another author, thus re—defining the very practice of writing a novel usually considered a solitary act. A constant dialogical back-and-forth of co—writing and editing constituted the basis of their literary co— authorship. Dorris’s Paper Trail is dialogically dedicated to Louise Erdrich: “Absent by name / from most of these pages / only because / you are so everywhere / within them,” and Dorris credits her “extraordinary intelligence and oversight.” Dedications in her books speak volumes. The 1993 edition of Love Medicine says: “I could not have written it this way without Michael Dorris, who gave his own ideas, experiences, and devoted attention to the writing. This book is dedicated to him because he is so much a part of it.” Even their dedications were dialogic, acknowledging each other’s influence and support, even if in the end we only get glimpses of that complex professional and personal relationship they shared. Dorris and Erdrich not only re—wrote the novel in the sense that they re—defined the concept of authorship as a dialogic practice performed in tandem, but they also re—wrote the published novels, usually considered as the end product. It is a form of literary ecology, or re—cycling, of manufacturing something new out of something old. The re—visions undermine the supposed stability of the text. Few writers questioned the fallacy of security of published novels, but Erdrich responded dialogically to criticism in an attempt to promote the cultivation of American Indian culture, to alleviate stereotypes of Native life, to empower female protagonists of Native society, to paint a more positive and agential picture of Ojibwes, and to inspire Native Americans and other readers. Erdrich’s writing reaches a wide audience because it concerns shared human experiences such as relationships, both their ambivalence and their beauty. Erdrich includes instead of alienating, describes and sympathizes instead of judging, which makes her an internationally acclaimed author, her work crossing topographies, epistemologies, and ethnic identities and therefore garnering serious awards. In August 2014 she was the winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize’s distinguished achievement award which

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honors those who promote peace through literature. In September she received the 2014 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. The award is very prestigious and goes to “a living American author whose scale of achievement in fiction, over a sustained career, places him or her in the highest rank of American literature” (pen.org). In their citation, the judges Edwidge Danticat, Zadie Smith, and E.L. Doctorow thus spoke of her accomplishments: Some writers work a small piece of land: Louise Erdrich is not one of those writers. Her work has an awesome capaciousness—each person is a world. For Erdrich, the tale of the individual necessarily leads to the tale of the family, and families lead to nations, while the wound of a national injustice is passed down through the generations, expressing itself in intimate deformations, a heady intertwining of the national and the personal. Yet despite the often depressingly familiar, repetitive nature of so much human business, Erdrich’s eye is always fresh, her sentences never less than lyrical. As we hear from the character Lipsha Morrisey, in her stereophonic 1984 debut, Love Medicine: “So many things in the world have happened before. But it’s like they never did. Every new thing that happens to a person, it’s a first. To be a son to a father was like that. In that night I felt expansion, as if the world was branching out in shoots and growing faster than the eye could see.” Everything under the sun is new to Erdrich: the secrets that run in families, the arrival of flowers in spring, the steady accumulation of births and deaths. She both attests to these natural cycles and describes our unique predicaments within them. Never a generalist, her work is always local, and precise. As Faulkner had his Yoknapatawpha, so North Dakota has, for thirty years, provided a home for Erdrich’s restless imagination—and yet what a vast embrace is this author’s! Pursuing the seeds of her own lineage she has drawn comprehensive portraits of Native American life, followed German immigrants in cramped boats across the Atlantic, and delved inwards, right back to conception, in her wonderful non-fiction account of childbearing, The Blue Jay’s Dance. Read in full she dazzles as a writer of all times and all places, following those branching shoots of story wherever they sprout. She is a writer only America could have produced, committed to the extraordinary project of capturing a complex land and a various people in their own voices, and in hers. (pen.org)

This passage beautifully begins to sum up Erdrich’s sensitivity as a writer. The prizes keep trickling in. In March 2015, she was awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction honoring her body of work, her imagination and her depiction of the unique American experience. Previous winners include E.L. Doctorow and Don DeLillo. In an interview Erdrich muses on not being selective about life experiences and taking them as they come: “Maybe when I'm eighty, I'll start being a person who

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will choose the less complex of the choices, and life will be manageable,” Erdrich says. “But I don't do that. I have an overwhelming need to experience everything that life can possibly offer” (barnesandnoble.com). The “Mino Bimaadiziwin,” the “good life” against all odds she portrays with bold complexity and uncanny inter—connectedness constitutes a trigger for a dialogue with readers all over the globe. Just having published her fifteenth novel LaRose, she proves storytelling to be an integral part of her life, an obsession almost. She says: “It’s probably the most selfish thing I do . . . .Truly. I don’t do it for anyone else. I do it because I have the addict’s need to get lost in the story . . . .And it gets worse and worse every year. I could go to rehab for this, but it’s my life” (McGrath). Life, writing and storytelling are inter— connected, inseparable for her and we, as readers, witness that phenomenon, hopefully for years to come.

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INDEX

“Advice to Myself” (Erdrich), 121 Antelope Wife, The (1998), 9, 13, 14, 42, 59, 61, 78, 79, 83, 84, 102-103, 107, 123, 132, 142 Antelope Wife, The (2012), 9, 13, 41, 42, 57, 59, 61, 67, 78, 79, 84, 86, 87, 132, 142 autobiographical writing, 1, 2, 40, 42, 89, 90, 91, 92, 105, 106, 107, 112, 115

Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace (Waldman), 109 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 1, 2, 3, 9, 11, 12, 13, 15, 17, 18, 19, 30, 31, 34, 46, 83, 88, 99, 123, 129, 130, 133, 147, 168 Bal, Mieke, 16, 23, 32, 128, 130, 136 Bassnett, Susan, 167 Beet Queen, The, 40, 48, 53, 58, 59, 63, 73, 100, 101, 102, 104, 124, 127, 129, 132, 136, 140, 141, 143, 144, 145, 146 berdache, 26, 27 Bhabha, Homi, 164 Bingo Palace, The, 8, 17, 41, 59, 70, 71, 72, 73, 99, 108, 124, 125, 127, 128, 132, 139, 140, 141, 146 Birchbark Books & Native Arts, 89, 114, 116, 117, 118 birchbarkbooks.com/blog, 3, 89, 117, 118 Birchbark House, The, 124-125



Birchbark House Fund, The, 118 Black Milk: On Writing, Motherhood, and the Harem Within, 111, 112, 120 Blue Jay’s Dance, The, 9, 13, 63, 89, 90, 91,92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 103, 104, 106, 107, 110, 113, 115, 119, 120, 121, 170 Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country, 9, 89, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 119 Broken Cord, The, 40, 41, 58, 59, 105, 106 Butler, Judith, 24, 25

Chabon, Michael, 9, 108, 109, 110 Chickadee, 124 compost pile, 10, 11, 13, 14, 17, 18, 34, 35, 54, 63, 64, 87, 97, 123, 134, 137, 168 contact zones, 148 Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams, 19 Crown of Columbus, The, 41, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 57, 58, 59, 106, 107, 108

Derrida, Jacques, 150 Dialogic Imagination, The, 2, 11, 34 Dorris, Michael, 1, 4, 5, 6, 9, 14, 17, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 59, 63, 64, 84, 92, 94, 95, 97, 105, 106, 107, 109, 110, 111, 112, 133, 140, 166, 169

Dialogism or Interconnectedness in the Work of Louise Erdrich Emerson, Caryl, 2 Erdrich, Aza, 118, 119 Erdrich, Heid E., 84, 118, 119 Erdrich, Pallas, 119 Erdrich, Persia, 8, 116 equivalence in difference, 148, 150, 154, 157, 161, 164, 166

facebook.com/louiseerdrichauthor, 3, 89, 117, 118 Faulkner, William, 7, 17, 44, 54, 69, 170 Four Souls, 72, 124, 127, 132, 137, 140

183

Love Medicine (1984), 6, 7, 9, 13, 16, 20, 39, 40, 41, 45, 55, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 83, 86, 123, 124, 125, 127, 130, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 138, 139, 141, 142, 144, 145, 146, 170, Love Medicine: New and Expanded Version (1993), 9, 20, 41, 53, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 86, 87, 125, 126, 130, 131, 169 Love Medicine: Newly Revised Edition (2009), 9, 20, 62, 63, 68, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 84, 86, 87, 99, 100

Game of Silence, The, 124

Halberstam, Judith Jack, 27 heteroglossia, 2, 3, 12, 17, 30, 31, 32, 90, 111, 129, 168 Holquist, Michael, 2, 29, 34, 150, Howe, LeAnne, 14, 15

intersectionality, 19

Jacklight, 20, 59 Jakobson, Roman, 150, 157, 162, LaRose, 8, 56, 113, 124, 132, 146, 171

Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, The, 9, 10, 11, 15, 16, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 56, 72, 124, 127, 132, 138, 142, 148, 149, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164 Liu, Lydia, 150, 151, 154,



Madsen, Deborah, 8, 68 Master Butchers Singing Club, The, 73, 118, 124, 132, 143, 145 Márquez, Gabriel García, 44 memoir, 2, 9, 13, 15, 32, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 97, 98, 105, 112, 113, 114, 119, 168 Mino Bimaadiziwin, 8, 68, 171 Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual (Treuer), 77, 83, 84, 155 Niranjana, Tejaswini, 152, 153, 165 North Dakota Tetralogy, 9, 20, 41, 53, 62, 63, 71, 73, 78, 123, 124, 127, 132

Oates, Joyce Carol, 54 O’Connor, Flannery, 44 Of Woman Born (Rich), 105 Owens, Louis, 7

Painted Drum, The, 72, 124, 127, 132, 142, 143 Paper Trail (Dorris), 97, 105, 112, 169

184 Plague of Doves, The, 8, 9, 124, 132, 142, 146 prefixes, 1, 3, 4, 29, 148 poetry, 20, 38, 84, 95, 103, 126, 127, 133 polyglossia, 3, 12, 17, 30, 31, 32, 93, 168 Porcupine Year, The, 124 Pratt, Mary Louise, 148

Rafael, Vicente, 159, 160, 165 Rich, Adrienne, 105, 110-111 Robinson, Douglas, 163, 164 Rooms in the House of Stone (Dorris), 41 Round House, The, 8, 9, 41, 64, 124, 132, 142, 146 Ruoff, A. LaVonne Brown, 51, 52, 62, 92, 93, 121

Index surplus of humanness, 18, 19, 30, 130

Tales of Burning Love, 18, 41, 86, 124, 125, 127, 132, 141, 142 temporary storage, 13, 35, 53, 62, 77, 87, 168 Tipton, Billie, 27 thirdness of dialogue, 29, 150 Tracks, 20, 40, 53, 59, 62, 63, 72, 73, 99, 105, 118, 124, 125, 127, 128, 129, 132, 135, 136, 137, 138, 146 “Tracks”, 62, 123 Treuer, David, 77, 83, 84, 155 tribalography, 14, 15 trickster, 26, 27, 67, 159

Venuti, Lawrence, 159, 165 Sakai, Naoki, 149, 152, 154 Shadow Tag, 18, 59, 132 Shafak, Elif, 111, 112, 120 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 126, 143, 144, 145 Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton, 27



Waldman, Ayelet, 9, 108, 109, 110, 111

Yellow Raft in Blue Water, A (Dorris), 17, 40, 42, 54, 59