SOURCE: Sands, Kathleen M. “Love Medicine: Voices and Margins.” In Louise Erdrich's “Love Medicine”: A Casebook, edited by Hertha D. Sweet Wong, pp. 35-42. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

[In the following essay, Sands considers stylistic aspects of Love Medicine, maintaining that “ultimately it is a novel, a solid, nailed-down, compassionate, and coherent narrative that uses sophisticated techniques toward traditional ends.”]

Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich is a novel of hard edges, multiple voices, disjointed episodes, erratic tone shifts, bleak landscapes, eccentric characters, unresolved antagonisms, incomplete memories. It is a narrative collage that seems to splice random margins of experience into a patchwork structure. Yet ultimately it is a novel, a solid, nailed-down, compassionate, and coherent narrative that uses sophisticated techniques toward traditional ends. It is a novel that focuses on spare essentials, those events and moments of understanding that change the course of life forever.

Like many contemporary novels, Love Medicine is metafiction, ironically self-conscious in its mode of telling, concerned as much with exploring the process of storytelling as with the story itself. As marginal and edged, episodic and juxtaposed, as this narrative is, it is not the characters or events of the novel that are dislocated and peripheral. Each is central to an element of the narrative. It is the reader who is placed at a distance, who is the observer on the fringes of the story, 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.

The fact that this is a novel written by an Indian about Indians may not be the reason for Erdrich's particular choice of narrative technique and reader control, but it does provide a point for speculation and perhaps a clue to the novel as not just incidentally Indian but compellingly tribal in character.

We have come to expect certain things from American Indian contemporary fiction. Novels from the Southwest have been overwhelmingly concerned with story, traditional stories reenacted in a ceremonial structure at once timeless and timely. Novels like N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn and Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony are rich in oral tradition and ritual and demand intense involvement of the reader in the texture and event of tribal life and curing processes. James Welch's novels, Winter in the Blood and The Death of Jim Loney, are less obviously immersed in oral tradition but draw on tribal history, landscape, and psychology to develop stories and characters that are plausible within Northern Plains tribal ways. Gerald Vizenor's St. Louis Bear-heart draws on various Plains oral traditions and manipulates them in a satirically comic indictment of a blasted American landscape and culture. In each case, these major American Indian novelists have drawn heavily on the storytelling traditions of their peoples and created new visions of the role of oral tradition in both the events of narrative and narrative process.

In these novels it is the responsibility of both the major characters and the reader to make the story come out right. The authors consciously involve readers in the process of narration, demanding activity that is both intellectual and emotional, remote and intimate. Louise Erdrich's novel works in much the same way, but the materials are different and the story-telling process she draws upon is not the traditional ceremonial process of the reenactment of sacred myth, nor is it strictly the tradition of telling tales on winter nights, though there is some reliance on that process. The source of her storytelling technique is the secular anecdotal narrative process of community gossip, the storytelling sanction toward proper behavior that works so effectively in Indian communities to identify membership in the group and ensure survival of the group's values and its valued individuals. Erdrich's characters are aware of the importance of this tradition in their lives. At one point the lusty Lulu Lamartine matter of factly says, “I always was a hot topic.”¹ And the final narrator of the novel, Lipsha Morrissey, searching for the right ingredients for his love potion, comments, “After a while I started to remember things I'd heard gossiped over” (199). Later, on the run from the law with his father, he says, “We talked a good long time about the reservation then. I caught him up on all the little blacklistings and scandals that had happened. He wanted to know everything” (268). Gossip affirms identity, provides information, and binds the absent to the family and the community.

The inclination toward this anecdotal form of storytelling may well derive from the episodic nature of traditional tales, that are elliptical because the audience is already familiar with the characters, their cultural context, and the values they adhere to. The spare, elliptical nature of Erdrich's novel can be loosely related to this narrative process, in which the order of the 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. The gossip tradition within Indian communities is even more elliptical, relying on each member's knowledge of every individual in the group and the doings of each family (there are no strangers). Moreover, such anecdotal narration is notoriously biased and fragmented, with no individual being privy to the whole story. 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. The very nature of gossip is instability, 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—probably not to some community member but, ironically, to some outsider who has been patient enough to listen and frame the episodes into a coherent whole. In forming that integrated whole, the collector has many choices but only a single intention, to present a complete story in a stable form.

Perhaps the novelist in this case, then, is that investigator (of her own imagination and experience) who manipulates the fleeting fragments of gossip into a stable narrative form, the novel, and, because of her artistic distance from the events and characters, supplies the opportunity for irony that the voices in the episodes of the novel are incapable of. Secrets are revealed and the truth emerges from the threads of information. Like the everyday life it emerges from, gossip is not inherently coherent, but the investigator can use both its unreliable substance and its ambiguous form to create a story that preserves the multiplicity of individual voices and the tensions that generate gossip. The novelist can create a sense of the ambiguity of the anecdotal community tradition yet allow the reader to comprehend. Gossip, then, is neither “idle” nor “vicious”; it is a way of revealing secrets and generating action.

So it is with Love Medicine. 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. The dialogue is terse and sharp, as tense as the relationships between the characters. Narrators are introduced abruptly to turn the action, jar the reader's expectations, give words to the characters' tangled lives. This is a novel of voices, the voices of two families whose members interpret and misinterpret, and approve or disapprove (mostly the latter) of one another's activities.

The novel begins with a story that suggests a very conventional linear narrative. June Kashpaw, the erratic and once vivacious beauty of the family, is down and out, heading for the bus that will take her back to her North Dakota reservation. But she is easily seduced by a mud engineer and ends up on a lonely back road on a subfreezing night, wheezing under the drunken weight of her ineffective lover. She walks—not just away, but across the plains into the freezing night and death from exposure. In one chapter she is gone—but the memory of her vitality and the mystery of her death will endure. She is the catalyst for the narrations that follow, stories that trace the intricate and often antagonistic relationships in the two families from which she came. One life—and not a very special life at that, just a life of a woman on the fringes of her tribe and community, a woman living on the margins of society, living on the hard edge of survival and failing, but a woman whose death brings the family together briefly, violently, and generates a multitude of memories and stories that slowly develop into a coherent whole. It is June (and the persistent desire of the family members who survive her to understand her and, consequently, themselves) who allows us to penetrate the chaotic and often contradictory world of the Kashpaw and Lamartine families and to bring a sense of history and order to the story, to bring art out of anecdote and gossip.

The structure of the narrative is not as chaotic and episodic as it first may appear. Time is carefully controlled, with 1981, the year of June's death, the central date in the novel. Subsequent to her death, the family gathers, and even those not present, but central to the narration, are introduced by kinship descriptions. The family genealogies are laid out, and as confusing as they are in that first chapter, they become easy and familiar as the episodes unfold and family secrets are revealed. Chapters 2 through 6 of the novel leap back in time—1934, 1948, 1957, 1980—until the pivotal date, 1981, is reached again at the center of the novel. As one of the characters puts it, “Events loop around and tangle again” (95). From this year, the novel progresses to 1984 and begins to weave together the separate stories into an intricately patterned fabric that ironically, even in the end, no single character fully understands; one secret is never told. This flashback-pivotal-year-progressive chronology, however, is by no means straightforward. Within chapters, time is convoluted by the injection of memory, and each chapter is controlled by the narration of a different character whose voice (style) is markedly different from all the other voices and whose recollection of dialogue complicates the narrative process even further. The system of discourse in the novel is thus dazzlingly complex, demanding very close attention from the reader. But the overlap of characters allows for comprehension. The novel is built layer upon layer. Characters are not lost. Even June, vitally alive at least in memory, stays until the end. In fact, it is she who connects the last voice and the final events of the novel to all the others. It is through June that each character either develops or learns identity within the community, but also, since this is metafiction, in the novel itself.

There is a sort of double-think demanded by Erdrich. 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. This tension at times creates an almost intolerable strain on the reader because the gaps in the text demand response and attempted resolution without connected narrative. The characters innocently go about their doing and telling, unaware of other interpretations, isolated from comprehension of the whole, but they are no less agonized, no less troubled, no less comic for their innocence.

The reader must go through a different but parallel discomfort, puzzling right along with them to the end. One character pointedly asks another, “Do you like being the only one that's ignorant?” (243); the question might as easily be asked of the reader, and indirectly it is. At times, the reader is inclined to think June well out of the mixed-up madness of her families, and even wish this narrative might simply be read as a collection of finely honed short stories. But making the story come out right is irresistible, to be in on the whole story is too intriguing to be abandoned. Like the character in the novel, we must respond, “no,” to being ignorant. Discovering the truth from the collection of both tragic and comic positions presented in the separate episodes demands that we stick around to bridge the gaps.

There is something funny about gossip, simply because it is unreliable, tends to exaggeration, makes simple judgments, affirms belonging at the very moment of censure. 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. Erdrich's novel does exactly that. It takes what might be tragic or solemn in a more conventional mode of telling and makes it comically human (even slapstick), sassy, ironic, and ultimately insightful about those families who live on that hard edge of survival on the reservations of the Northern Plains. It is, of course, the very method of the novel, individuals telling individual stories, that not only creates the multiple effect of the novel but requires a mediator, the reader, to bring the episodes together.

It is exactly the inability of the individual narrators to communicate effectively with one another—their compulsion to tell things to the reader, not to each other—that makes their lives and history so very difficult. At several points in the novel, characters reveal their difficulties in communicating: “My tongue was stuck. I was speechless” (99); “There were other times I couldn't talk at all because my tongue had rusted to the roof of my mouth” (166); “Alternating tongue storms and rock-hard silences was hard on a man” (196). Their very inability to give words to each other except in rage or superficial dialogues masks discomfort, keeps each one of them from giving and receiving the love that would be the medicine to cure their pain or heal their wounds. All but June, and she has the author and the other characters to speak for her, and she is beyond the healing embrace of family love.

In the end, some bridging occurs in the novel; Erdrich even titles the last chapter “Crossing the Water” and an earlier chapter “The Bridge.” The water is time: “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” (93). The bridge, of course, is love. But the love in this novel is mixed with pain and failure: “And now I hurt for love” (128); “It's a sad world, though, when you can't get love right even trying it as many times as I have” (218). It demands suffering as well as pleasure: “A love so strong brews the same strength of hate” (222). Surprised at Marie's response to Nector's death, Lipsha explains:

I saw that tears were in her eyes. And that's when I saw how much grief and love she felt for him. And it gave me a real shock to the system. You see I thought love got easier over the years so it didn't hurt so bad when it hurt, or feel so good when it felt good. I thought it smoothed out and old people hardly noticed it. I thought it curled up and died, I guess. Now I saw it rear up like a whip and lash.

(192)

But despite the conflicts and personal tragedies, it is love medicine, a potion that works reconciliation in spite of its unconventional sources, that holds these characters together even as they antagonize and disappoint one another. Love is so powerful that it creates indissoluble ties that even outlast life, and ultimately it allows forgiveness. In the end, in spite of perversions of love, illicit love, and lost love, there is enough love to bring two women together and a lost son home.

Erdrich's characters are lovers in spite of themselves, and the potion that works to sustain that love is language—language spoken by each narrator to the reader, language that leads to the characters' understanding of the fragile nature of life and love. Near the end of the novel, the bumbling “medicine man” discovers the essential truth of life:

You think a person you know has got through death and illness and being broke and living on commodity rice will get through anything. Then they fold and you see how fragile were the stones that underpinned them. You see how instantly the ground can shift you thought was solid. You see stop signs and the yellow dividing markers of roads you've travelled and all the instructions you had played according to vanish. You see how all the everyday things you counted on was just a dream you had been having by which you run your whole life.

(209)

The one thing left that makes life endurable is love. Life is tenuous; love is dangerous, and love potions risky:

[W]hen she mentions them love medicines, I feel my back prickle at the danger. These love medicines are something of an old Chippewa speciality. No other tribe has got them down so well. But love medicine is not for the layman to handle. You don't just go out and get one without praying for it. Before you get one, even, you should go through one hell of a lot of mental condensation. You got to think it over. Choose the right one. You could really mess up your life grinding up the wrong little thing.

(199)

But healing family wounds isn't a matter of chemistry; it's a matter of words. Like an old folk charm spoken to oneself, the stories of love coerce the loved ones. Finally, the novel seduces the reader into affection for these sometimes silly, sometimes sad characters who are only real in the magic of words.

Love Medicine is a powerful novel. It develops hard, clear pictures of Indian people struggling to hold their lives together, hanging on to the edge of the reservation or fighting to make a place for themselves in bleak midwestern cities or devising ingenious ways to make one more break for freedom, but its most remarkable quality is how it manages to give new form to oral tradition. Not the enduring sacred tradition of ritual and myth that we have come to know in contemporary Indian literature, but a secular tradition that is so ordinary, so everyday, so unconscious that it takes an inquirer, an investigator, an artist to recognize its value and adapt its anecdotal structure to the novel. While Love Medicine may not have the obvious spiritual power so often found in Indian fiction, its narratives and narrators are potent. They coerce us into participating in their events and emotions and in the exhilarating process of making the story come out right.

As the number of novels by American Indian writers grows, we can begin to see just how varied are the possibilities for Indian fiction, how great the number of storytelling choices available from the various cultures of Indian tribes, how intriguing and unique the stories are within this genre of American fiction. Perhaps the one thread that holds this fabric of literature together is that the best works of American Indian fiction are never passive; they demand that we enter not only into the fictional world but participate actively in the process of storytelling.

Note

1. Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine (New York: Holt, 1984), 233. Subsequent references will be identified by parenthetical page numbers in the text.