SOURCE: Pittman, Barbara L. “Cross-Cultural Reading and Generic Transformations: The Chronotope of the Road in Erdrich's Love Medicine.” American Literature 67, no. 4 (December 1995): 777-92.

[In the following essay, Pittman explores how Erdrich uses time and space to create a narrative world in Love Medicine, noting that “[d]iscovering the literary and cultural features essential to a creative understanding of Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine means recognizing the literary and cultural chronotopes present in the work.”]

Writing from within two literary traditions, as all Native American writers do, Louise Erdrich writes both traditions into her work.¹ As a mixed-blood of German-American and Chippewa descent, she seems to embody the mediation that David Murray says is necessary in cross-cultural reading to “reduce the danger of making the space between the two sides into an unbridgeable chasm, or of turning differences into Otherness.”² Euro-Americans reading Native American literature face the particular challenge of mediating between the familiar literary patterns that arise from their own traditions and other, perhaps unfamiliar, patterns that elicit alternative cultural meanings. How is this done? Holistic methods are preferred today to past dissection; dialogics are preferred to dialectics. We look to see where traditions intersect rather than how they act in isolation, and we are not expected to enter the reading by renouncing who we are as readers. Mikhail Bakhtin describes such a reading as an act of creative understanding, a “dialogic encounter of two cultures [that] does not result in merging or mixing”: “Creative understanding does not renounce itself, its own place in time, its own culture; and it forgets nothing. In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding—in time, in space, in culture.”³ A mediative reading that focuses on the dialogic relationship between the two cultures represented in Native American literature creates a bridge that not only allows either culture to be viewed through the lens of the other but also reveals the complex exchanges inherent in such a reading and in a nation composed of multiple, coexisting Americas. Gerald Vizenor suggests using a postmodern critical discourse to “liberate tribal narratives in a most. ‘pleasurable misreading’” from “social science monologues.”⁴ Bakhtin's dialogics are both liberating in Vizenor's sense and optimistic about the possibility of exchanging meaning; other, pessimistic ways of reading paralyze readers with the impossibility of shedding their “outsideness.”⁵

Discovering the literary and cultural features essential to a creative understanding of Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine means recognizing the literary and cultural chronotopes present in the work. The term chronotope is borrowed from Einstein to represent the concept time-space. For Bakhtin, novels think and act historically through their appropriation of “real historical time and space,” which provides “the ground essential for the … representability of events.”⁶ To recognize this chronotopic ground is to discover the cultural worldview underlying the entire narrative. Of course, a novel is not finally reducible to a single chronotope but is a complex of major generic chronotopes and minor chronotopic motifs that “may be interwoven with, replace or oppose one another, contradict one another or find themselves in ever more complex interrelationships” (DI [The Dialogic Imagination], 252). In a bicultural work such as Love Medicine, then, one would expect to find a web of competing chronotopes in dialogue and a central chronotope that serves as a unifying ground.

In addition to these internal chronotopes, there are the chronotopes of readers, who, “set off by a sharp and categorical boundary from the represented world in the text” (DI, 253), participate in the renewal and creation of the text. It is the chronotopes of readers that are of concern in cross-cultural reading.⁷ The burden of readers is to recognize their chronotopic situation and to engage in a dialogue that releases meaning—that produces a creative understanding—instead of overpowering the work from outside or being swallowed up in a futile attempt to shed their own positions in the world. In fact, positioning oneself as an outsider is finally a liberation from the need to react defensively, a release from the guilt of being an outsider. Readers accept their limitations and their desire to understand, and get on with the act of reading. Not surprisingly, perhaps, my analysis of Love Medicine reveals my position by focusing first on a chronotopic motif from Euro-American literature and following one of its transformations in the Euro-American tradition; I then experience a creative encounter with the text that results in a dialogic interchange at the boundary between the two literary traditions. What begins as a generic transformation becomes a cross-cultural transformation as well.

In his essay “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” Bakhtin recognizes a chronotopic motif present in some form in nearly all works—the chronotope of the road—in which “the unity of time and space markers is exhibited with exceptional precision and clarity” (DI, 98). The importance of the chronotope of the road lies in its convenience for meetings and encounters. Such meetings can serve important “architectonic functions” (DI, 98) in the plot or can be combined with the “chronotope of the threshold” as a “moment of crisis” (DI, 248). When Bakhtin says that “[t]ime, as it were, fuses together with space and flows in it (forming the road),” he recalls the many historical forms in which a continuous road provides a ground for “all the events” (DI 244). By far the most familiar genre in Euro-American literature organized around this chronotope is the picaresque.

Erdrich uses the road motif for the architectonic functions of opening and closing her novel, as well as for representing chance encounters between characters. Love Medicine opens with June Kashpaw “walking down the clogged main street of oil boomtown Williston, North Dakota,”⁸ waiting for the bus that is to take her home along another road. She is “killing time” (LM [Love Medicine]1) until a chance encounter finds her driving “down the street in … [a] Silverado pickup” with a “mud engineer” named “Andy” (LM, 3). Finally, “far out of town on a county road” (LM, 4), they attempt to have sex, and June decides to walk home, going “off the road” (LM, 6; emphasis added) and through the fields, despite a winter storm, a storm in which she finally dies.

The closing episode has June's son Lipsha Morrissey driving the highways toward home after having helped his father, Gerry Nanapush, escape to Canada. He comes to “the bridge over the boundary river,” where he stops to remember such things as an old ceremony of offering “tobacco to the water,” his mother, and “sunken cars” (LM, 271). After recalling the myth of the river once having been “an ancient ocean,” Lipsha faces the “truth” of the “dry land” and continues on the “good road” home (LM, 272).

In between these two homeward-bound events are at least five other major encounters and dozens of smaller, sometimes trivial, references to roads. Most of the major encounters are moments of crisis expressed through sex or death and consequently contributing to both the establishment and the dissolution of the central family groups. The accumulated road references reinforce the concrete representation of time and space, and, because of the probability of chance encounters in such places, also reinforce the absurd nature of man's existence in time and space. The motif of the road as a way of representing time and space in the novel has a particular significance in relationship to the picaresque.

Because the chronotope of the road is most familiar in the Euro-American tradition through the picaresque, any subsequent use of this chronotope, while re-accentuated, retains a “‘stylistic aura’” from “that genre in which the given word usually functions. It is an echo of the generic whole that resounds in the word.”⁹ This generic echo, resounding here in the chronotopic motif, recalls typical picaresque motifs and prompts the reader to translate them into this text.¹⁰ In the picaresque novel, a long winding road determines the plot, as it “passes through familiar territory, and not through some exotic alien world”; it reveals “the sociohistorical heterogeneity of one's own country” in the variety of events that take place along it (DI, 245). The first effect of reading Love Medicine through the picaresque lens is to recognize in its disconnected road scenes, which involve a number of the novel's main characters, a movement away from linear continuity toward a postmodern, antilinear discontinuity—a formal depiction closer to the picaresque condition of “continuous dis-integration.”¹¹ As metaphor, the discontinuous road seems to comment on the breakup of the Native American tribal community as it tries to exist both within and without the dominant culture of Euro-America. Erdrich depicts pieces or fragments of roads separated by postmodern silence and narrated by isolated voices; the events that occur on them share the characters' sense of fragmentation and isolation.

There are several other implications and advantages of reading Love Medicine as a version of the picaresque. Because the spatial aspect of the novel (seen in the road) is more developed than the temporal, the year designations at the beginning of each chapter can be read as Erdrich's imposition of a definite, if mechanical, temporal structure to achieve a balance between time and space. The traditional picaresque depicts a socially diverse world through a dual focus on adventure and the development of the hero as he interacts with such a world. Erdrich's episodic, multi-narrative style duplicates or improves upon the picaresque by setting a diverse group of protagonists in a diverse world. Just as the early picaresque was “a reaction against Renaissance humanism, in its more classicizing and idealizing modes,”¹²Love Medicine is a satire on the romanticization of Indians, not only in its honest depiction of alcoholism and physical abuse but also in such scenes as those in which Nector poses for the “Plunge of the Brave” (LM, 91)—a painting that shows the Western ideal of the naked, noble savage—or works in movies, always as a dying brave. Nector is used again for a picaresque as well as postmodern engagement with the canon “through a critical lampooning of some of [society's] favorite literature”¹³—specifically Moby-Dick. By having Nector live the “marginal man's career of deception”¹⁴ through his identification with both Ishmael and Ahab, Erdrich engages in a dialogue with the canon that subverts its power and calls attention to barriers between oral and written traditions. When Nector tells his mother, Rushes Bear, that the novel is about a “great white whale,” she wants to know what “they got to wail about, those whites” (LM, 91).

Although Euro-American-trained readers may initially read Love Medicine as inscribed with the picaresque, by positioning themselves as outsiders they can create an atmosphere in which alternative meanings are sought and welcomed. When such readers then seek out Native American literary traditions and attempt to reconcile them with their own, they may discover that narratives “do make things happen.”¹⁵

The literary mediator between the picaresque and the postmodern in Love Medicine is the tribal trickster, who substitutes for the picaro and assists in the generic transformation. As Bakhtin notes, the rogue, fool, and clown bring with them “the right to be ‘other’ in this world” (DI, 159):¹⁶

They grant the right not to understand, the right to confuse, to tease, to hyperbolize life; the right to parody others while talking, the right to not be taken literally, not “to be oneself”; the right to live a life in the chronotope of the entr'acte, the chronotope of theatrical space, the right to act life as a comedy and to treat others as actors, the right to rip off masks, the right to rage at others with a primeval (almost cultic) rage—and finally, the right to betray to the public a personal life, down to its most private and prurient little secrets.

(DI, 163)

The trickster brings a postmodern sense of play and chance that transforms the initial view of the fragmented road into a “playful, paratactical”¹⁷ style that is, in Hayden White's words, “intrinsically communal.”¹⁸ At the same time, the trickster performs a second transformation, this time mediating between cultures for readers. The trickster plays in the gaps between Erdrich's episodes; if readers hear the trickster in the silence they can transform their readings of schizophrenic fragmentation into communal unity. In postmodern narrative forms, Euro-American literature has finally caught up with Native American literary traditions.

There seems to be some question, however, about how to define a trickster novel and whether or not Love Medicine is one. Alan Velie is inclined to call Love Medicine a trickster novel because “Gerry Nanapush is clearly a modern avatar of the trickster,” but he has reservations because Gerry is “not really the central character.”¹⁹ In fact, Velie thinks that Love Medicine may not be a novel at all, but a “collection of short stories all of which deal with the same set of characters.”²⁰ Catherine M. Catt sees Erdrich incorporating “traits of this figure [the trickster] into characterizations of various individuals” to create “Trickster-related characters.”²¹ Both Velie and Catt seem to be clinging to Euro-American definitions of narratives of emergence that are concerned with the development of a single character. But if Love Medicine is not a trickster novel, it is at least trickster discourse according to Gerald Vizenor's definition.

Velie is looking for a central character who is consistently present as a trickster, and he is right in observing that Love Medicine has no such character. According to Vizenor, however, the trickster in postmodern discourse “is not a presence or a real person but a semiotic sign in a language game, in a comic narrative that denies presence.”²² All the voices that make up trickster discourse participate in the “trickster sign”—the “author, narrator, characters and audience.”²³ The communal sign is a dialogue. Thus, all the characters and narrators, the author, and the reader perform an act of (trickster) transformation in the text—they create community. Vizenor is attempting to free Native American narratives from the monologues of social science and the individualism of modernism. To read trickster discourse as postmodern discourse is to “imagine … liberation.”²⁴ In Love Medicine, trickster behavior is not confined to one character. June, Henry, Gerry, Lipsha, Lulu, and Marie all exhibit such behavior at one time or another, and it creates a liberating/communal atmosphere in which the reader is liberated from the picaresque and is free to experience the communal. June, for example, has an out-of-skin transformation in the bathroom before she goes out with Andy (LM, 4), and when she is able to extricate herself from his pickup, she falls out but “somehow … land[s] with her pants halfway up” (LM, 5); we find out that as a child June was hanged but escaped death (LM, 19-20). Marie calls June a child of the “Manitous, invisible ones who live in the woods” (LM, 65). Lipsha, Lulu, and Marie all seem to have special powers: Lipsha has “the touch” (LM, 190); Lulu has “wild and secret ways” that cause her to love “the whole world” (LM, 216) and that result in many sexual adventures; Marie senses things either “in the scar of her hand” or from “her household appliances” (LM, 198). Henry considers himself an escape artist like his brother Gerry—“No jail built that can hold me either” (LM, 135). Even at 12, Gerry is “light on his feet and powerful” and soon to be a “natural criminal and a hero” (LM, 84-85). Gerry miraculously impregnates Dot through “a hole ripped in her pantyhose and a hole ripped in [his] jeans” in a prison “visiting room” (LM, 160); the child of this union, not surprisingly, “did not register at all” (LM, 171) on the truck weighing scales.

Bakhtin's creative understanding and trickster discourse have much in common as ways of reading; both release readers from the captivity of their own cultures and promote an enriched understanding of the text. The liberating technique of creative understanding unleashes new potentials from both cultures and contributes to a dialogic environment of the sort needed for trickster discourse to make something happen. The trickster, as “liberator and healer,”²⁵ is able to free the text and the reader from the burden of monologic literary structures and heal the wounds of a fragmentary presentation. One encounters neither the picaro nor the trickster in Love Medicine; one experiences instead a “creative encounter”²⁶ that is trickster discourse. This experience reveals the interaction of both literary traditions in the text as the chronotope of the road reveals both the heterogeneity and the community of Native American culture.

The chronotope is dialogic, and the chronotope of the road, drawn from the Euro-American literary tradition, can compete via dialogue with Native American chronotopes. What are the differences between Euro-American and Native American views of time and space? Edward T. Hall depicts the Euro-American spatial view of “time as a road or a ribbon stretching into the future, along which one progresses. The road has segments or compartments which are to be kept discrete.”²⁷ Small wonder that the picaresque is so easily discerned in Erdrich's text by Euro-American readers: “Our concept of space makes use of the edges of things. If there aren't any edges, we make them by creating artificial lines.”²⁸ We situate events on the edges of roads, at concrete intersections of time and space. Paula Gunn Allen speaks of the Native American “concept of time [as] timelessness … the concept of space [as] multidimensionality.” Native Americans have “plenty of time” because time and space move in a “dynamic equilibrium.”²⁹ Allen characterizes the difference between Indian time and Western industrial time as ceremonial versus mechanical. Native American writers who incorporate both kinds of time into their works call attention to the centrality of the chronotope in cultural identity.

Erdrich depicts the overlapping effects of both mechanical and ceremonial time in order to elaborate the unique position in time and space of twentieth-century Native Americans. Living in the continual confrontation of two chronotopes, Native Americans are in a situation that is, in Bakhtin's words, “full of event potential.”³⁰ As suggested earlier, the year designations that introduce the chapters in Love Medicine seem to be a mechanical imposition of industrial time, which rigidifies and closes. At the same time, however, the “chronological loop” made by the sequence, which begins in 1981 then loops back to 1934 and forward through 1981 to 1984, is representative of cyclic time, in which any event is part of an “endless round of time.”³¹ Even in the sequence of disconnected episodes that skip over time, Erdrich provides continuity in the endurance of specific family groups in a specific place. The struggle between the centripetal and centrifugal forces of communal and fragmentary chronotopes is sometimes resolved in the immediacy afforded by “using multiple narrators, multiple narratives. … Storytelling brings everything into the present.”³²

Erdrich's characters exhibit a variety of chronotopic behaviors and views arranged to show what Allen calls the “disease-causing effects” of mechanical/industrial time.³³ The majority of “places” in Love Medicine are institutional—school, church, reservation, prison. Such settings emphasize the claustrophobic feeling that contributes to disease-causing effects and also show how Native Americans are interpellated by the dominant culture. The clearest dichotomy is between the Kashpaw twins, Eli and Nector, who represent the chronotope of the tribal community versus the dominant chronotope of progress and individualism. Their mother allows the government to take only one of the boys for boarding school, hiding Eli “in the root cellar dug beneath her floor” (LM, 17). The outcome is dramatic in old age, for “Eli was still sharp, while Grandpa's [Nector's] mind had left us” (LM, 17). They don't even look like twins “anymore, for Eli had wizened and toughened while Grandpa was larger, softer, even paler than his brother” (LM, 25). Eli lives the life of the outdoorsman; he is a “real old-timer” (LM, 28). Nector is a Euro-American-educated success but pays for “knowing white reading and writing” (LM, 17) by losing his memory. He remembers “dates with no events to go with them, names without faces, things that happened out of place and time” (LM, 18). Instead of being able to remember his kin, “[d]ates, numbers, figures stuck with” Nector (LM, 16), who is frequently “counting something under his breath. Clouds. Trees. All the blades of grass” (LM, 19). If we think of this loss of memory as the inability to re-member that “which is basically dismembered and disjointed,”³⁴ there are serious implications for the maintenance of tribal unity. Nector would be a clear failure if Erdrich had not somewhat redeemed him by allowing his spirit to return after death in order to express a healing love.

When Nector is young and beginning to lose his memory, he fuses time with the metaphorical image of water, an image that allows him to relinquish control over his life. He floats “through the calm sweet spots” (LM, 92) until the river takes a turn. The time when his children are growing passes him by, but he takes no responsibility for it: “So much time went by in that flash it surprises me yet. What they call a lot of water under the bridge. Maybe it was rapids, a swirl that carried me so swift that I could not look to either side but had to keep my eyes trained on what was coming. Seventeen years of married life and come-and-go children” (LM, 93). Nector is so caught up in the unrelenting forward movement of industrial time that even when he catches a glimpse of its passing he is helpless to change: “Time was rushing around me like water around a big wet rock. The only difference is, I was not so durable as stones.” He is unable “to swim against the movement of time” (LM, 94). Nector is isolated in time and moved by it rather than being a natural part of all time and space like his brother.

City time is set against reservation time in the characters of King Kashpaw and Beverly Lamartine, who make their livings in the city but have community ties to the reservation. Beverly is an Indian “with a certain amount of natural stick-to-it-iveness,” a trait appreciated in the city. In the city he has his own salesman's “territory,” bounded by imaginary edges, where he lies to prospective customers with stories of a son who benefits from the “after-school home workbooks” (LM, 77) Beverly tries to sell. His stories promote the boy as following the Euro-American chronotope of progress, clearing “the hurdles of class and intellect” (LM, 78), skipping grades, and achieving more than the previous generation. Beverly, who has “the need to get ahead” and thinks of Indians as “quite backward” (LM, 77), is able to deny his identity in the city by marrying a blue-eyed “natural blond” and passing himself off as “tan” (LM, 79). Erdrich shows that even in Beverly, however, the will to imagination outside of industrial time is central to his way of thinking. His desire to actually have such a boy as his son causes “his mind [to race] through the ceilings and walls” to where the boy is. He imagines “himself traveling … westward, past the boundaries of his salesman's territory … to the casual and lonely fields, the rich, dry violet hills of the reservation … home” (LM, 79). But in order to actually go there, he must make mechanical time arrangements “for a vacation” and an “appointment to have a once-over done on his car” (LM, 80). The way of life on the reservation is enticing but also threatens his livelihood; he knows “[n]o one on the reservation would buy” the “word-enrichment books” (LM, 88). When he finally does give in to Lulu, he relinquishes a time-oriented way of life for one that travels “through the walls and ceilings, down the levels, through the broad, warm reaches of the years” (LM, 86).

King, the son of June and Gordie, is an Indian in a constant rage fostered by his inability to fit into either the old ways of the reservation or the hurried ways of the city. In the city he is known by his hat with the “blue-and-white patch” that titles him the “World's Greatest Fisherman.” On the reservation his family knows he is not much of a fisher or hunter. They know that the first game he ever got was a “skunk when he was ten”; he tries to impress them by saying it was a “gook” when he “was in the Marines” (LM, 28). This is a lie, but because King is out of place on the reservation, he tries to impress his family with success in a place where they would be deficient. Wherever King is, he tries to fit in by being a successful outsider. King suffers from the same sense of being controlled by water as Nector does. The city's promise of upward mobility never seems to work for King: “It's like I'm always stuck with the goddamn minnows. Every time I work my way up—say I'm next in line for the promotion—they shaft me. It's always something they got against me. I move on. Entry level. Stuck down at the bottom with the minnows” (LM, 252). As a minnow, he feels that he is at the bottom “of the food chain” (LM, 253); like Nector he takes no responsibility for being there. Lipsha rightly attributes some of King's problems to the “deranging effects of [King's] apartment,” a spatial arrangement dictated by economy and efficiency that resembles a “long dark closet.” Even the area outside the window is “not outdoors” (LM, 250). Such an arrangement produces the final betrayal of his tribal roots: he becomes the “King of Stoolies” by informing the authorities about Gerry Nanapush's escape plans (LM, 259).

Unlike Nector, with whom she has a long affair, Lulu Lamartine “never did believe in human measurement.” Western civilization uses such measurement “for cutting nature down to size,” and the government uses it to know “the precise number [of Indians] to get rid of” (LM, 221). Lulu lives in and loves “the whole world” (LM, 216), and even feels encumbered by her body, which she “slip[s] … to earth, like a heavy sack” when making love (LM, 217). She looks forward to death when she will be “a piece of the endless body of the world feeling pleasures so much larger than skin and bones and blood” (LM, 226). But while she is alive, the land is essential to her idea of communal identity. Government offers of money result in the unnatural action of “Indians ordering their own people off the land of their forefathers” (LM, 223). Lulu refuses “to move one foot farther west” (LM, 222) until her house burns down and the tribe builds her a new one “on a strip of land rightfully repurchased from a white farmer” (LM, 227). This land eventually becomes “the Lamartine homesite” (LM, 229), and all the past concerns about land ownership get “lost in time, careful time” (LM, 228).

June Kashpaw and Lipsha Morrissey, mother and son, open and close the novel respectively, creating another loop in the established time sequence. In addition to continuing the idea of cyclical time, their movements toward home reinforce the difficulties of living in two cultures. According to James McKenzie, when June decides to walk home, she “rejects not only the boomtown and the bus ride, but even the white man's highway”³⁵ and returns to an instinctive memory of wind, direction, and topography. Perhaps a too-long separation from the land has clouded that memory, or perhaps she means to commit suicide, as Aurelia suggests. For whatever reason, she “mistakes the warm wind preceding the worst Easter blizzard in forty years for a Chinook”³⁶ and “pick[s] her way through the swirls of dead grass and icy crust of open ranchland” (LM, 6). June's rejection of the road for a watery way reflects the competition between the two ways of valuing time-space in the novel. June's choice is one open to all marginal groups—total rejection of the dominant culture and life in isolation. Erdrich has Lipsha opt for “a more reasonable course.”³⁷

Lipsha, using trickster logic, simultaneously rejects and embraces both water and the road. Sometimes the road and water merge into illusion, as when Grandma Marie collapses after Nector's death: “You see how instantly the ground can shift you thought was solid. You see the stop signs and the yellow dividing markers of roads you traveled and all the instructions you had played according to vanish. … And now she went underneath. It was as though the banks gave way on the shores of Lake Turcot … sending half the lake splashing up to the clouds” (LM, 209). More often than not, however, Lipsha chooses the road when he is heading home. In fact, it is Lipsha who chooses to play poker for King's car, in which he feels “free as a bird, as the blue wings burning on the hood” (LM, 266); and he remains with the car until the end of the novel. Before the final scene, though, “the car and road [stand] still” at the moment Lipsha has his identity confirmed by feeling his heart give a genetic “little burping skip.” As he stands on the “boundary river” (LM, 271) of the reservation, a natural boundary instead of a man-made edge, he considers the water that has come to represent the uncontrollable passage of time and the suicide that can solve “all our problems.” His decision associates “truth” with “dry land” and the past with the false romanticization of Native Americans that would prefer to see them “beneath them vast unreasonable waves.” It is a “good road” (LM, 272; emphasis added) that leads Lipsha, who walks not on frozen water as June does but over the water on a bridge that goes in both directions.

Reading across cultures while acknowledging one's own cultural position can be enriching for the reader as well as the literary work. The outsider's position is a favorable one, for the outsider is able, through dialogue, to produce the greatest understanding of the text and of the self. Louise Erdrich writes from within two literary traditions, and readers are correct in seeing both traditions alive in her work. The long road from the picaresque to the postmodern arrives simultaneously at the traditional Native American because both postmodern and Native American literatures are capable of being at once the dis-integration of linearity and the playful integration of the paratactical/communal. Love Medicine expresses fear of the disintegrated/assimilated community, a warning about the loss of traditional tribal values, and a playful community of storytelling voices. The overall effect of the novel is to record the persistence of the Native American community and its resistance to appropriation by the monologic discourses of the dominant culture. Focusing on the intersection of cultures illuminates both cultures. Euro-American ways of reading—in this case, Bakhtinian dialogics—can be used successfully when reading other literatures because reading as an outsider is an inherently dialogic act; such an act may be the best hope we have for achieving understanding instead of silence and isolation. My reading has been primarily a movement from the Euro-American toward the Native American, but I must emphasize that after such a reading one can read back through other texts, both Euro-American and Native American, using newly created meanings. Reading back through the picaresque, for example, one can easily see that the road motif—with the progress it can exemplify—rather than being a symbol of unity, is actually a disintegrating force that denies community and divides human interaction into disconnected episodes. On the other hand, perhaps we should look for a discourse of community in the picaresque that competes for our attention with the dominant discourse of discontinuity.

“Love is a stony road” (LM, 200); Lipsha says that, and he is usually right. But in Love Medicine that road is transformed into a web of “connecting threads of power” (LM, 248) that all lead home. And the reader, either through creative understanding or trickster transformation, becomes part of a dialogue of readings that all lead to a true literary community.

Notes

1. By emphasizing writing, I am confining my analysis to Native American literature in the written tradition, although translators of tales from the oral tradition engage in dialogue with the Euro-American tradition in their use of such items as paper, type, and white space. Whether Bakhtin's concept of creative understanding would produce the positive results I claim in a reading of translated tales is arguable. In “An Introduction to the Art of Traditional American Indian Narration,” Karl Kroeber asserts that “Indian narratives need sophisticated critical attention” and that readers inexperienced with Native American traditions should begin by “assum[ing] that such tales can be comprehended,” even though one “can never legitimately claim a final or complete understanding” (Traditional Literatures of the American Indian, ed. Kroeber [Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1981], 3, 2, 8-9). This generous invitation seems to acknowledge not only that a perfect understanding is nonexistent but also that Euro-American readers cannot read without the lens of their own critical traditions. Might some silencing occur? Of course, but the alternative is an unacceptable isolation.

   On the issue of Native American writers as bicultural, Arnold Krupat writes that in autobiographies by Indians who have “internalized Western culture and scription … there is inevitably an element of biculturalism” (“The Dialogic of Silko's Storyteller,” in Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures, ed. Gerald Vizenor [Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1989], 55-56). Thus, the voices of the Native American tradition are already mediated through the Euro-American theories “internalized by writers educated in that tradition. Louise Erdrich's formal education at Dartmouth and Johns Hopkins certainly mediates the voices of her Native American traditions.

2. David Murray, Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing, and Representation in North American Indian Texts (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1991), 1.

3. M. M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1986), 7.

4. Gerald Vizenor, “A Postmodern Introduction,” in Narrative Chance, 5. Vizenor takes the phrase “pleasurable misreading” from Vincent Leitch, Deconstructive Criticism (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1983), 59.

5. For example, Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey assert from a Marxist perspective that literature reproduces the ideology of the dominant class, regardless of the class or intention of the reader. In their analysis, “subjection means one thing for the members of the educated dominant class: ‘freedom’ to think within ideology, a submission which is experienced as if it were mastery”; the exploited classes “find in reading nothing but the confirmation of their inferiority” (Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young [Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981], 96). Therefore, no understanding is created by the reading of a text; domination is merely reinforced.

6. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1981), 84, 250. Subsequent references to this edition are noted parenthetically in the text as DI.

7. Unlike Catherine Rainwater in “Reading Between Worlds: Narrativity in the Fiction of Louise Erdrich,” (American Literature 62 [1990]: 405-22), I am not positing an imaginary, ideal reader who is easily manipulated by textual codes. My reader is a critical reader who comes to the text with many exegetic tools; my reading is more about how such readers can be disarmed.

8. Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine (1984; reprint, New York: Bantam, 1989), 1. Subsequent references to this edition are noted parenthetically in the text as LM. Erdrich's new version of Love Medicine (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1993) contains four new chapters and some minor textual revisions. This new version does not alter the thrust of my essay and will not be cited here; however, the process of such addition and revision is a good example of what Bakhtin calls the “unfinalizability” of a text.

9. M. M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, 87-88.

10. See Ulrich Wicks, “The Nature of Picaresque Narrative: A Modal Approach” (PMLA 89 [1974]: 240-49) for a list of picaresque characteristics. Wicks lists eight attributes of picaresque fiction, all of which can be found in Love Medicine. His discussion of the “picaro-landscape relationship” and its movement “from exclusion to attempted inclusion and back to exclusion” (245) is especially relevant to the difficulty faced by Native Americans trying to live in two cultures.

11. Wicks, “The Nature of Picaresque Narrative,” 244.

12. Walter L. Reed, An Exemplary History of the Novel (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981), 30.

13. Barbara A. Babcock, “‘Liberty's a Whore’: Inversions, Marginalia, and Picaresque Narrative,” in The Reversible World, ed. Babcock (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1978), 100.

14. Reed, An Exemplary History of the Novel, 71.

15. Krupat, “The Dialogic of Silko's Storyteller,” 63. Krupat identifies this creative possibility as Leslie Marmon Silko's belief, contrasting it with Auden's claim that “poetry makes nothing happen.”

16. Bakhtin's designations are similar to those of Barbara Babcock-Abrahams in “‘A Tolerated Margin of Mess’: The Trickster and His Tales Reconsidered,” Journal of the Folklore Institute 11 (1975): 147-86. Babcock-Abrahams equates the trickster and picaro as types of the marginal and, in fact, would prefer to use picaresque rather than trickster to describe such tales (159). I am arguing that the picaro is grounded in reality and usually represents a human being, whereas the trickster of Native American tradition is grounded in myth and not only takes nonhuman forms but, as Vizenor argues, is a linguistic sign. Vizenor further suggests that thinking of the trickster as a real person is a power move that reifies the comic discourse (“Trickster Discourse: Comic Holotropes and Language Games,” in Narrative Chance, 196).

17. Ihab Hassan, The Postmodern Turn, (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1987), 91.

18. Hayden White, “The Culture of Criticism,” in Liberations: New Essays on the Humanities, ed. Ihab Hassan (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1971), 69.

19. Alan Velie, “The Trickster Novel,” in Narrative Chance, 122-23.

20. Velie, “The Trickster Novel,” 123.

21. Catherine M. Catt, “Ancient Myth in Modern America: The Trickster in the Fiction of Louise Erdrich,” Platte Valley Review 19 (1991): 73, 76.

22. Vizenor, “Trickster Discourse,” 204.

23. Vizenor, “Trickster Discourse,” 188.

24. Vizenor, “Trickster Discourse,” 194.

25. Vizenor, “Trickster Discourse,” 187.

26. Vizenor, “A Postmodern Introduction,” 13.

27. Edward T. Hall, The Silent Language (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 28.

28. Hall, The Silent Language, 203.

29. Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 147.

30. M. M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984), 81.

31. Catherine Rainwater, “Reading Between Worlds,” 416.

32. Robert Silberman, “Opening the Text: Love Medicine and the Return of the Native American Woman,” in Narrative Chance, 114. See also Jean-Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984), for the idea of storytelling and its relation to the past: “a collectivity that takes narrative as its key form of competence has no need to remember its past. It finds the raw material for its social bond not only in the meaning of the narratives it recounts, but also in the act of reciting them. The narratives' reference may seem to belong to the past, but in reality it is always contemporaneous with the act of recitation. It is the present act that on each of its occurrences marshals in the ephemeral temporality inhabiting the space between the ‘I have heard’ and the ‘you will hear’” (22).

33. Allen, The Sacred Hoop, 150.

34. Babcock, “‘Liberty's a Whore,’” 108.

35. James McKenzie, “Lipsha's Good Road Home: The Revival of Chippewa Culture in Love Medicine,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 10 (fall 1986): 57.

36. McKenzie, “Lipsha's Good Road Home,” 57.

37. McKenzie, “Lipsha's Good Road Home,” 59.

I am grateful to Charles H. Adams for reading an early version of this essay and making valuable comments, and to M. Keith Booker for encouraging me to be aware of my critical lenses.