[In the following essay, Silberman places Love Medicine within the context of late twentieth-century Native American literature, arguing that Erdrich's novel signals a break with traditional modern Native American narratives.]

Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine opens with June Kashpaw, middle-aged Chippewa woman, wasting time in the oil boom town of Williston, North Dakota while waiting for a bus that will take her back to the reservation where she grew up. She allows herself to be picked up by a white man in a bar; after a short, unsatisfying (for her) bit of lovemaking in his pickup, she takes off, cutting across the snowy fields as a storm begins to hit. There is a narrative break and then we learn that she has frozen to death.

This opening immediately establishes a relationship between Love Medicine and a well-known group of works by Native American authors: D'Arcy McNickle's The Surrounded, N. Scott Momaday's The House Made of Dawn, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, James Welch's Winter in the Blood and The Death of Jim Loney. These works are central texts in Native American literature, bearing a striking family resemblance to one another.

Reduced to bare essentials, they tell of a young man's troubled homecoming. The opening line of The Surrounded sounds the theme: “Archilde Leon had been away from his father's ranch for nearly a year.”¹ The book's title proclaims the outcome; in the final line of the text Leon extends his hands to be shackled. From The Surrounded a clear line can be drawn to the later works by Momaday, Silko and Welch, in effect defining the backbone of contemporary Native American fiction.

Given this closely related body of texts, Native American literature seems made to order for recent developments in literary criticism and critical theory. The writings of McNickle, Momaday, Welch, Silko and others seem especially amenable to the analytical and interpretive preoccupations of such broad movements as structuralism and deconstructionist criticism. The many shared elements in the works, as well as the equally telling differences, make them a perfect case study for the analysis of combinations, oppositions and inversions beloved in structuralist criticism. Though not engaged in a technical, philosophical debate, Native American writers reveal an obsessive concern with the relation between speech and writing that is worthy of the deconstructionist critics. Finally, this body of literature incorporates among its major social and political concerns a preoccupation with origins, marginality and otherness that would have delighted Foucault. Notwithstanding the focus in these books on a central individual, the writers address broad historical relations between groups as well as individual psychology, dramatizing for example the conflicts between tribal peoples and institutional authorities such as the police, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the church. In such a context questions of language and discourse—Indian language(s) versus English, native forms of expression versus nontribal literary forms such as the novel—are inevitably questions of power.

It is possible to speculate on the reasons that the narratives of McNickle, Momaday, Silko and Welch take the form they do and hold such a central place in Native American literature. One could consider McNickle and Momaday in relation to Harold Bloom's theories of influence, or the relation of the works to the broader tradition of the bildungsroman, a common enough form for writers of first novels. One could consider the problem sociologically and historically, with McNickle first and then Momaday, Welch, and Silko marking a distinctive point in assimilation and education, moving in the crosscurrents between oral tradition and the Western literary tradition. Then there are obvious practical reasons: using a young man's rite of passage (or failed rite of passage) provides a central dramatic conflict that makes the individual's dilemmas representative of tensions shared by the larger community.

With such a clearly defined tradition, it is not difficult to see any new Native American novel as a response to the assumptions governing these books, different as they may be in detail. To write a historical novel like James Welch's Fools Crow may mean entering or criticizing an alternative tradition such as the historical romance, which like the bildungsroman has its own genealogy, in this context running from James Fenimore Cooper and Karl May to Hanta Yo. Similarly, Gerald Vizenor's decision to write satirical trickster narratives, short stories in length only, is implicitly a comment on the mainstream tradition in Native American writing. That tradition is marked by a relatively conservative brand of literary realism in spite of its unmistakable discomfort with the conventions of realism and its occasional experimentalism and pursuit of a transcendental frame of reference.

The beginning of Love Medicine therefore signals a recasting of the tradition represented by the other works even as it partly continues to work within the older conventions and share many of the same concerns: the consequences of an individual's return or attempted return to the reservation, the significance of home and family, the politics of language and the relation between speaking and writing. Love Medicine has its own distinctive style characterized by the use of multiple narrators and a relaxed, informal approach that is, like June Kashpaw herself, good-humored and graceful yet hard-bitten. Love Medicine has little of the violence and stark, tough landscape that characterize the work of McNickle, Momaday, Welch and Silko; perhaps that can be ascribed to a Midwestern, as opposed to a Western sensibility. All the same, if in its opening Love Medicine suggests a move away from McNickle, Momaday, Silko, Welch and company, in the end (perhaps understandably) it moves more centripetally as the similarities with the other authors becomes increasingly evident. Yet Love Medicine remains a striking achievement, in part because of its subtle balance between a willingness to present a new approach marked by a narrative openness and the need to address important if familiar topics and find a satisfactory form of closure.

The narrative at once departs from the earlier novels in several key ways. The central figure is a woman, not a man. The return, the first step, does not lead to a prolonged series of encounters and soulsearching that make up the body of the work and ultimately prove defeating or redeeming; instead June's first step is her last. The narrative does not develop directly out of the problems caused by a return; it arises out of questions raised by the failed return. Somewhat in the manner of a murder mystery, the death becomes a means of exploring not only the victim's life but the lives of those around her. Love Medicine could have been called “Who Killed June Kashpaw?” or rather “What Killed Her?” since the responsibility and guilt are shared by many individuals embedded in an entire way of life, a complex mesh of biographical and historical factors. The remembrance of the death wells up from time to time, as when June's son King in the middle of a fight with his wife suddenly breaks into sobs and screams at his father, “It's awful to be dead. Oh my God, she's so cold.”² The sadness observed in the young June's eyes by the woman who took her in as a child (68) underlies the entire text. It is its fundamental subtext, even with Erdrich's wonderful comic sense: June's presence, that is, her absence, haunts the book. The oppressive weight of her death is not exorcised until the final page.

With June Kashpaw's death, more lyrical but no less surprising in terms of narrative conventions than the murder of Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) in the shower in Psycho, Erdrich immediately decenters the novel; unlike the earlier novels Love Medicine has no sustaining central consciousness or protagonist. Part of the shock arises from the fact that the narrative begins neutrally but then clearly leans toward Jean's point of view:

She was a long-legged Chippewa woman, aged hard in every way except how she moved. Probably it was the way she moved, easy as a young girl on slim hard legs, that caught the eye of the man who rapped at her from inside the window of the Rigger Bar. He looked familiar, like a lot of people looked familiar. She had seen so many come and go. … She wanted, at least, to see if she actually knew him.

(33)

While the descriptions of the man's actions and statements remain objective, the narrative keeps moving toward the woman's point of view: “She couldn't help notice. … He could be different, she thought. … It was later still that she felt so fragile” (3-4). Though identified as “Andy,” the man remains “he,” while the narrator refers to the woman familiarly as “June.”

Following the embarrassing experience in the pick-up, bordering on comedy but too unpleasant for laughs, the first section ends with a dream-like poetic figure: “The snow fell deeper that Easter than it had in forty years, and June walked over it like water and came home” (6). Abruptly, the second section undercuts the redemptive imagery:

After that false spring, when the storm blew in covering the state, all the snow melted off and it was summer. It was almost hot by the week after Easter, when I found out, in Mama's letter, that June was gone, not only dead but suddenly buried, vanished off the land like that sudden snow.

(6-7)

This statement in the first person—the speaker is June's niece Albertine Johnson—establishes the narrative style for the novel: a collection of interlocking narratives each focusing on a different narrator or major character, yet all ultimately related to that original event—the death of June Kashpaw. The characters often tell their own stories, not only explaining their relationship to the dead woman but also spinning out a larger web of relationships that appear as a comment on her death, thereby providing the context in which it can be understood. June Kashpaw is referred to occasionally in these personal narratives but she is rarely central until the concluding section. Although some characters are deliberately prevented from taking over the narrative voice—for instance June's unsympathetic son, King, and her sympathetic lover, Gerry Nanapush—there is neither a continuous omniscient narration nor a central character. Instead, the role of narrator moves freely from character to character, moving forward and backward in time as well. The opening chapter takes place in 1981, the second in 1934, the fourteenth and final one in 1984. Thus the novel takes on the character of a jigsaw puzzle; different areas are filled in at different times. Spatial and temporal order follows a logic of development apart from simple chronology or the existence of any individual character; for example the chapter describing June's husband, Gordie, appears past the book's midpoint, though it picks up only a month after June's death.

Michael Wood once remarked that Faulkner was a key figure for many of the Latin American writers of the “Boom” (Vargas Llosa, Donoso and above all García Márquez) because he demonstrated that novels could be formally experimental works of modern art while not abandoning the traditional concern with social description.³ Faulkner after all wrote family sagas, historical novels portraying communal life from generation to generation. Faulkner is a favorite author of Erdrich's; Love Medicine has more than a passing resemblance to As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom and The Sound and the Fury.⁴ Whether or not Erdrich was directly influenced by the Latin Americans, and in particular, by García Márquez, her work uses some of the same methods and at times a similar tone. The constant shifting of point of view and the chronological jumps in the narrative make divergent versions of a single event possible, introducing a modernist sense of relativism and discontinuity as well as a good deal of ironic humor.⁵ The attempt to hang June as a child appears twice, once in Albertine's narrative (19-20) and once in Marie Kashpaw's (67-68); the appearance of Beverly Lamartine at Lulu Nanapush's house is told first by a neutral narrator (75-6), and later by Beverly's rival for Lulu's affections, Nector Kashpaw, who describes Beverly as “a slick, flat-faced Cree salesman out of Minneapolis … a made-good shifty type who would hang Lulu for a dollar” (102). As this bit of invective suggests, the language used in Love Medicine is not radical at all. Though not without some poetic passages, as one would expect from the author of Jacklight, the text generally avoids the difficulty characteristic of so much modern literature; the language used to tell the story is a lively combination of down-to-earth colloquialism and occasional literary flourishes. Throughout Love Medicine one of Erdrich's key concerns is narrative agility and speed, as in García Márquez; confronted by alternative narrative media such as television and movies these authors resort to an armory of devices that would make Dickens proud. Like García Márquez, Erdrich uses the artful proleptic tease:

At the time her [Lulu Lamartine's] hair was still dark and thickly curled. Later she would burn it off when her house caught fire, and it would never grow back.

(83)

It would not surprise Bev to hear, after many years passed on, that this Gerry grew up to be both a natural criminal and a hero whose face appeared on the six o'clock news.

(85)

And she delights in making the story seem more immediate by shifting the narrative from the past tense into a dramatic present tense. This technique is used with Nector Kashpaw, who loses his memory thereby becoming the perfect embodiment of a conflation of past and present: “Anyway, once I got to town and stopped by the tribal offices, a drunk was out of the question. An emergency was happening.”

And here is where events loop around and tangle again:

It is July. The sun is a fierce white ball. Two big semis from the Polar Bear Refrigerated Trucking Company are pulled up in the yard of the agency offices, and what do you think they're loaded with? Butter. That's right. Seventeen tons of surplus butter on the hottest day in '52.

(95)

Or again, later in the same chapter: “No sooner had I given her up than I wanted Lulu back. … It is a hot night in August. I am sitting in the pool of lamplight at my kitchen table.” (104)

Such devices date back at least to Victorian melodrama, as do some of the thematic concerns such as the fascination with matters of paternity and maternity. These are serious matters: The novel concludes when a sympathetic character, Lipsha Morrissey, discovers the true identity of his mother (June Kashpaw) and his father (Gerry Nanapush). His meeting with his father is as important for the narrative as some of the great recognition and reunion scenes in classical literature, such as the recognition of Odysseus' scar and his reunion with Telemachus in the Odyssey. But typically for Erdrich, this climactic scene is played in a low-key comic fashion. It takes place in a kitchen in the [Twin] Cities, over a card game. The father and son recognize their shared kinship in part because they both learned to cheat at cards from their mother/grandmother, Lulu Lamartine. The comic side of the scene is complemented, however, by their intense awareness of the missing mother and lover, June Kashpaw. They are playing with her other son, King, for a car purchased with the insurance money from her death; as the game progresses Lipsha (the narrator for this section) reviews the life of father, mother and son before bringing the story full circle:

I could see how his [Gerry's] mind leapt back making connections, jumping at the intersection points of our lives: his romance with June. The baby given to Grandma Kashpaw. June's son by Gordie. King. Her running me off. Me growing up. And then at last June walking toward home in the Easter snow that, I saw now, had resumed falling softly in this room.

(262)

With the family history clear at last, the disruption caused by the death can now be overcome. And so the meeting of father and son leads to a fairytale, Hollywood ending: the son helps the fugitive father escape to freedom across the Canadian border, and the father tells the son of a genetic heart defect, so that Lipsha is freed from the need to either make good on his enlistment into the Army or continue his flight from the authorities.

This resolution suggests how Erdrich takes apart and puts back together the traditional narrative. Instead of a man it is a woman returning home at the beginning. She dies immediately; but the traditional dilemma of the individual—home as freedom versus home as trap—reappears tied to a mystery of identity which is resolved favorably. The son meets his father who successfully escapes, while the son resolves an identity crisis and returns from his wanderings with a newly found peace of mind. The last word of the novel, significantly, is “home.”⁶

Georg Lukacs described the novel as the form “like no other,” expressing a “transcendental homelessness.”⁷ In Love Medicine the concern with home informs the entire narrative, as Erdrich rings the changes upon the term, which is by no means always identified with a condition of bliss. Albertine (in some ways a double for her Aunt June) is both ambivalent and matter-of-fact in describing her return to the reservation after her aunt's death: “Just three miles, and I was driving down the rutted dirt road, home” (11). But she immediately finds herself in the middle of a squabble between her mother and her Aunt Aurelia:

“June was all packed up and ready to come home. … She walked out there because … what did she have to come home to after all? Nothing!”

“Nothing?” said mama piercingly. “Nothing to come home to?” She gave me [Albertine] a short glance full of meaning. I had, after all, come home, even if husbandless, childless, driving a fall-apart car.

(12)

The family get-together sours. Near the end of Albertine's narrative King and his wife have a massive fight; as they go out leaving the kitchen a shambles the wife says, “You always get so crazy when you're home. We'll get the baby. We'll go off. We'll go back to the Cities, go home” (39). There's no place like home—but which one?⁸

Clearly, home in Love Medicine is an embattled concept, as ambiguous as June Kashpaw's motives in attempting her return. When Lipsha tells his father that at last he's “home free,” Gerry Nanapush immediately contradicts him: “No,” he said … I won't ever really have what you'd call a home” (268). As his son realizes, Gerry is a man on the run. But he is strong and self-confident, unlike Henry Lamartine, Jr., a tragic figure whose return from the Vietnam War makes him an updated version of earlier figures such as Tayo in Ceremony. His brother, Lyman Lamartine, says, “When he came home … Henry was very different, and I'll say this: the change was no good” (147).

Like House Made of Dawn and Ceremony, Love Medicine seems to fall on the optimistic, ultimately upbeat side of the great divide governing the Native American novels of homecoming.⁹ Yet Erdrich's multivoiced, multicharacter narrative method enables her to establish a complicated system of narrative balance. Thus, if two favored figures escape in a kind of romantic fantasy, another perishes; Henry Jr. drowns before he can sort out any of the confusion caused by his war experiences. The gentle Lipsha benefits from discovering the identity of his father, regaining his special “touch” in both healing and card playing; but Lyman Lamartine gains nothing from the knowledge that Nector Kashpaw was his father. His mother, Lulu, sees his problem:

“You know what,” he sighed after a while. “I don't really want to know.”

Of course, he did know that Kashpaw was his father. What he really meant was there was nothing to be done about it anymore. I felt the loss. I wanted to hold my son in my lap and let him cry. Even blind, a mother knows when her boy is holding in a painful silence.

(233)

Writers such as McNickle move in the direction of high tragedy. Their world is oppressive and fatalistic, a throwback to the naturalism of Wharton's Ethan Frome or Zola's La Bête Humaine. At times the declarative sentences make the prose seem carved from blocks of stone: the narrative provides an immutable record of an implacable fate. Momaday and Silko, in contrast, see ceremony as a means of escaping nature, of leading life and art toward transcendence. With her poet's voice Erdrich often moves away from the mundane and the matter of fact, but she rarely explores exalted realms of the spirit: a vision of the northern lights shared by Lipsha and Albertine is perhaps the one notable exception. Indian ritual has no place in Love Medicine except in the “touch” of Lipsha, presented satirically when he replaces goose hearts with store-bought frozen turkey hearts, and watches his “patient” choke to death. Filtered through the survivors' point of view, the ghost returns as a melancholy apparition, not a horrific incubus from the afterlife. (Here is one more similarity with the tone and manner of García Márquez, who favors an equally sad image of the afterlife.) Erdrich seems to find the profane more interesting if not more desirable than the sacred; she is a worldly author and it is difficult not to suspect that she agrees with Lipsha, possibly the most sympathetic character of all, when he says:

Our Gods aren't perfect … but at least they'll come around. They'll do a favor if you ask them right. You don't have to yell. But you do have to know, like I said, how to ask in the right way. That makes problems, because to ask proper was an art that was lost to the Chippewas once the Catholics gained ground. Even now, I have to wonder if Higher Power turned it[s] back, if we got to yell, or if we just don't speak its language.

(195)¹⁰

This is an ambivalent attitude to say the least: one part faith and two parts doubt and disappointment. Lipsha's brief comment about Catholicism is not elaborated upon except as Catholicism is presented in a broadly satirical manner, especially in the character of an intimidating hell-fire and brimstone nun, Sister Leopolda, a figure out of Fellini. (I am thinking in particular of Juliet's childhood experience in the convent in Juliet of the Spirits.)

Erdrich, on balance, is essentially a comic writer. Most of the key moments in Love Medicine are comic ones, from the fateful encounter between Nector Kashpaw and Marie Lazarre, played out as a love scene complicated by the presence of two dead geese tied to Nector's wrists, to the card game between King, Gerry and Lipsha. Even a houseburning is grotesquely comic, an accident perhaps, but certainly not the mean-spirited Snopes vengeance in Faulkner's “Barn Burning.” Erdrich's characters often move into melancholia or wistful reminisce, as when the high-spirited and assertive Lulu Lamartine (i.e., Libertine), the novel's version of the Wife of Bath, admits that “It's a sad world, though, when you can't get love right even after trying it as many times as I have” (218). With the death of June Kashpaw, Erdrich immediately establishes her awareness of the bleak side of existence; even sweet-natured Lipsha comments that the marked deck was appropriate for “the marked men, which was all of us” (259). Yet the story never lingers on the tragic, returning again and again to a bemused, ironic view of the comic incongruities of parents and children, friends and lovers. In the end, though the love medicine proves fatal to Nector, there is a reconciliation between the rivals, Marie Kashpaw and Lulu Lamartine, Nector's wife and his mistress, in the senior citizen's home. All passion spent, Lulu says, “for the first time I saw exactly how another woman felt, and it gave me deep comfort, surprising” (236). The passage ends with a sweet—perhaps too sweet—vision of harmony as Marie puts drops in Lulu's eyes: “She swayed down like a dim mountain, huge and blurred, the way a mother must look to her just born child” (236).

In Walter Benjamin's famous essay on Leskov, “The Storyteller,” Benjamin proclaims that the death of storytelling and its replacement by the novel represented the death of true human communication and wisdom.¹¹ The villain is the book, which replaces the companionship that exists between teller and listener with the distance between the isolated writer and the equally isolated reader. In most Native American literature the book is not embraced but accepted as a necessary evil: story and storytelling are the ideals. In “The Storyteller's Escape” Silko writes, “With these stories of ours / we can escape almost anything / with these stories we will survive.”¹²

Setting the oral against the written, storytelling against novel-writing, indicates a romantic approach to art and life, a literary vision of a fall from a Golden Age to an impersonal present. After all, storytelling might be regarded as a representation of experience with no special status. Nevertheless it is the impression of presentness and of presence, of social intimacy and communion that matters, and in Love Medicine Erdrich subtly shapes the narrative to create a sense of immediacy. The characters themselves almost at once demonstrate the effects of storytelling, for it is storytelling that animates the women in the kitchen after June's death: their recollection of the youthful hanging episode, a playful yet symbolic anticipation of her fate, brings them all to life, giggling and “laughing out loud in brays and whoops … waving their hands helplessly” (21).

The opposition between speech and writing in Native American fiction may not exist in the same conceptual framework as the opposition between speech and writing in the philosophical and theoretical discourse of Derrida and contemporary literary theory. Still, the problem of language and an appropriate language for writing about Native American experience remains fundamental in these works. Thus in Ceremony, Silko frames her narrative with sections that are poetic and ritualistic. Similarly, Momaday frames House Made of Dawn with traditional ceremonial introductions and conclusions. These mixed forms straddle Native American and Western forms of expression. There are other signs of the central problems of language and form in the incorporation of episodes involving historical texts, such as the journal in House Made of Dawn and the repeated play between characters who speak English and those who speak tribal languages.

In Love Medicine Erdrich takes a different approach to the relation between native forms and the Western literary tradition. Her work, like the work of Silko and others, seems at times to aspire to the status of “pure” storytelling. This goal would make the literary text appear to be a transcription of a speaker talking in the first person present tense, addressing a clearly defined listener. Thus in several of the narratives the speaker addresses a “You.” This can become too insistent, a tic rather than a sign of sincerity, as when Lipsha remarks, “I told you once before” (195), or Lulu Lamartine plays confidante with the reader by saying, “Nobody knows this” (218). Yet the attempt at seeming intimacy does move the text in the direction of an informal, colloquial prose. The liveliness of Love Medicine has less to do with some formal notion of speech as utterance than its success as dialogue capturing just plain talk—kitchen-table talk, bar talk, angry talk, curious talk, sad talk, teasing talk.

But in a printed text, the return of the literary is inevitable; all the devices that stylistically mark the pursuit of immediacy are in the end visible as literary devices.¹³ Using the first person present tense as a substitute for third person past tense “omniscient” narration, or using colloquial diction and sentence structure as opposed to more elaborate, artificial forms must be judged within the context of a range of possibilities that govern all “realistic” prose. Erdrich's artfulness is evident for example in several beautifully sustained metaphors which appear independently in the narratives of different characters, notably a fishing image connected to Nector Kashpaw's failing memory that first appears in Albertine's narrative and then migrates into Lipsha's (193, 208, 209).

The naturalness of Erdrich's characters is as much a construction as the skill at creating a convincing voice that led Hemingway to see in Twain's Huckleberry Finn the start of a genuine American literary tradition—an anti-literary, seemingly informal American style based on colloquial expression.

There are precedents of sorts for much of what Erdrich accomplishes in Love Medicine in the Latin Americans, in Faulkner, in Edgar Lee Masters and Thornton Wilder, in the fascination during the past three decades with oral history—from Studs Terkel, to the Vietnam oral histories, to Black Elk Speaks—and in the Raymond Carver-Bobbie Ann Mason school of writing, with its seemingly affectless but extremely stylized tragi-comic glimpses of lower middle-class life. In each case literature attempts to free itself of the literary, as if any intervention or mediation by an author were inevitably a falsification, and only a supposed transcription could capture the truth. This literary antinomianism seems distinctly American.

Love Medicine, as its title suggests, is centered in the relationships between lovers and families. Yet because Erdrich moves away from the narrow focus of the earlier novels toward the historical novel and the family saga, she is able to touch upon economic and political matters in an extremely effective way. There are characters who can make money and characters who can't; and since at least one character is engaged in tribal politics there are some sharp things said about how things get done on the reservation. More pointed are some observations made in passing by the characters in the course of their dramatic monologues, beginning with Albertine Johnson's bitter remark in the aftermath of her aunt's death on “rich, single cowboy-rigger oil trash.” To these types she says, “an Indian woman's nothing but an easy night” (9). Shortly thereafter Albertine's notes that “The policy of allotment was a joke” (11). Such asides run through the multiple narrative without ever coming to a head in the action. In Love Medicine, the Native Americans speak and after the appearance of the unfortunate Andy right at the start the whites are all but invisible, pushed to the margins, except for the caricature of the rich lady who makes Nector Kashpaw famous as a naked warrior in a painting, The Plunge of the Brave. There are no political confrontations perhaps partly because the skepticism is directed internally, as in the case of Lulu Lamartine's battle with the tribal council to keep possession of her house. Even Gerry Nanapush, a colorful, sympathetic and rebellious desperado leader of the American Indian Movement, is presented by his son, Lipsha, with more than a touch of amusement: “Gerry Nanapush, famous politicking hero, dangerous armed criminal, judo expert, escape artist, charismatic member of the American Indian Movement, and smoker of many pipes of kinnikinnick in the most radical groups. That was … Dad” (248). (The passage where Lipsha addresses the question of his father's guilt in relation to the killing of a federal agent at Pine Ridge is one of the few unconvincing sections in the novel, a too-neat cop-out (269).)

One of the peculiar aspects of Erdrich's writing, even more evident in The Beet Queen, is her presentation of history. In Love Medicine individual sections are dated and tied to various before-and-after events in the convoluted sexual/personal relations linking the many characters, but there is little sense of an outside historical framework. With the exception of a few historical references, the episodes of the thirties could take place in the fifties or eighties. This may show that Erdrich is not interested in circumstantial social realism. But Love Medicine becomes historical and political through the personal, such as when Henry Jr. goes to Vietnam and Gerry joins the American Indian Movement.

Such a concentration on personal, family matters may be intentional, but the sense of being removed from political events is a powerful statement about marginality and disenfranchisement while also suggesting a preferred concern with the personal and private life of the community. Lulu Lamartine, a tough political commentator, mentions the forced migrations of the Chippewa from the far side of the Great Lakes, but she says only that the story her grandmother used to tell “is too long a story to get into now” (222). She then returns to her own refusal to move from her house. This is a typical Erdrich maneuver; she has inserted a broad political and historical point, then channeled the narrative back to a seemingly personal issue. The focus in Love Medicine on family may reflect an eighties concern with domesticity and “roots” and personal heritage; King's wife, Lynette, “with a quick burst of drunken enthusiasm,” says to one of the older Kashpaws, “Tell 'em. … They've got to learn their own heritage. When you go it will be gone!” (30) Much later Lipsha refers to his search for his father as his “quest” saying, “I had to get down to the bottom of my heritage” (248).

Erdrich, however, does not present a rose-colored view of an ideal nuclear family in the manner of television series such as Little House on the Prairie or the Depression-era drama The Waltons, but rather a completely unsentimental view, both affectionate and angry, of an extremely complicated extended family. And central to that vision of the family is a history that is largely unspoken in Love Medicine but that appears at times in personal terms through memory: the memory that exists in the hands of June's husband leading him to drink when they remind him of the feel of her body (172); the memory that plagues Gerry Nanapush and makes him go see her son King so that he can be reminded of her through King's features (262). In the final turn to memory and history Erdrich opens up her text, and not only by using multiple narrators, multiple narratives. The move is temporal as well. Storytelling brings everything into the present. But Erdrich hints at a more comprehensive truth that goes back beyond the death of June Kashpaw to a larger source of woe: one that explains why the Chippewa move west of the Great Lakes to a home on the reservation that drives them into a cycle of departure and return.

By the time Erdrich concludes the story of the Kashpaws, Lamartines and Nanapushes (the extended story of the tragedy of June Kashpaw), it is clear that she has circumscribed her story temporally, no matter how relatively open it may seem in terms of narrative technique and range of feeling. In a sense all Native American writers are historical writers, their kinship based on the shared assumption that history holds the key to understanding contemporary Native American life. Behind the immediate problems of home, family and paternity (or maternity) stands the unanswerable past. Max in The Surrounded proclaims to Archilde, “We've got to plan something. We won't let it end for you, like you thought. We'll make a new beginning!” But the last spoken lines in the book are those of Parker, the agent, scornfully telling Archilde, “It's too damn bad you people never learn that you can't run away. It's pathetic.” What they can't run away from is less a physical location than a historical situation. That accounts for the pain in Jim Loney when he realizes that there is no place where “pasts merged into one and everything was all right and it was like everything was beginning without a past. No lost sons, no mothers searching.” He adds, damningly, “There had to be that place, but it was not on this earth.” The individual stories of the protagonists in Native American fiction meet in the collective history. They embrace Tayo's awareness in Ceremony that “His sickness was only part of something larger” as well as the bitterness at the end of Fools Crow when the title character realizes that change, loss and unhappiness are to be the fate of his people, and that their only consolation will be in stories telling them of “the way it was.”¹⁴

In Love Medicine Erdrich is concerned with the experience of the Chippewa in the mid-twentieth century. The story leaves largely untold the parallel story of the whites and the historical background of events. It is not at all surprising that, having concentrated in Beet Queen on the German side of her heritage and the bleak beauty and twisted emotional universe of the Plains, Erdrich wrote Tracks, a historical novel on an older generation, the ancestors of the characters in Love Medicine.¹⁵

Notes

1. D'Arcy McNickle, The Surrounded (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1964) 1. cf. Winter in the Blood (New York: Penguin, 1986); where the main character observes right at the start, “Coming home was not easy anymore,” 2.

2. Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine (New York: Bantam Books, 1984), 33. All page references are to this edition and will hereafter be provided in parentheses in the text.

3. Professor Wood made his remarks as the featured speaker at a meeting in the late 1970s of The Columbus Circle, the organization for graduate students in American Literature at Columbia University.

4. In the retrospection of As I Lay Dying; in the idea of the novel as conversation of Absalom, Absalom; in the expressionistic use of point of view in The Sound and the Fury, and more. Erdrich expressed her admiration for Faulkner's early writings in an interview with Amy Ward, “The Beet Generation,” University of Minnesota Daily, October 29, 1986: 18.

5. The only real exception occurs in pages 237-239 when the narrator is Howard Kashpaw (also “King Junior” and “Little King”), whose impressionistic, youthful point of view recalls Joyce's experimentation in adopting the point of view of the young Stephen Daedalus at the beginning of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Faulkner's method in using Benjy Compson as a narrator in The Sound and the Fury. But Erdrich's style is not as extreme.

6. The last line, Lipsha's “So there was nothing to do but cross the water, and bring her home” (272) picks up on the final line in the opening section as June walks over the snow like water. Since the passage contains no clear antecedent for “her,” there is a kind of echo of June's presence as well as a play on a colloquial phrase (as in “let 'er rip”). The fusing of antecedents is also used in Henry Jr.'s narrative when Albertine merges in his mind with a Vietnamese woman: “She was hemorrhaging” (138). (Albertine seems to be something of a loose strand in the plot; she disappears from the action after her encounter with Henry Jr. in Fargo, though she is mentioned in a bit of conversation between Lipsha and Gerry, with Lipsha referring to her as “the one girl I ever trusted” (270). One of the characteristics of “open” form is a refusal to tie up loose ends and account for all the characters in the manner of the “classical” nineteenth-century novel; but in this case it seems simpler to regard Albertine's absence as a result of Erdrich's method, which brought together short stories as the basis for the novel.)

7. Georg Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971) 41. Lukacs is deliberately playing upon a statement by Novalis, “Philosophy is really homesickness” (quot. 29).

8. Erdrich's poem “Family Reunion,” Jacklight (New York; Henry Holt, 1984) offers a brief glimpse of a gathering similar to the one that greets Albertine when she returns home following the death of her Aunt June. But it is the first line of the next poem in the volume, “Indian Boarding School: The Runaways,” that expresses the essential idea: “Home's the place we head for in our sleep” (11). The line recalls the dialogue between husband and wife in Robert Frost's “The Death of the Hired Hand”:

   “Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
   They have to take you in,”
   … … … … … … …
                                                                                                       “I should have called it
   Something you somehow haven't to deserve.”

   (The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem [London: Jonathan Cape, 1967] 38)

   The relation between Erdrich's poetry and her fiction is a fascinating one (as is the relation between the short stories as individual entities and as sections of Love Medicine). Love Medicine goes far beyond the poem “A Love Medicine” in Jacklight, a good poem marred by the overwrought description of masculine violence (“she steps against the fistwork of a man. / She goes down in wet grass and his boot plants its grin / among the arches of her face” (7); male mistreatment Erdrich handles in a more complex and subtle fashion with Andy and others in the novel.

   As a revision and expansion of the sequence of poems “The Butcher's Wife” Jacklight, The Beet Queen (New York: Henry Holt, 1986) seems less than successful. In this case the poetry goes beyond the novel, especially in the dark, bitter quality in a line like “Something queer happens when the heart is delivered” (in “That Pull from the Left,” 41-42). I suspect that one reason the book founders is that it is not really about characters and events but about what one character, Karl Adare, describes as “the senseless landscape” (318), that is, about the unreal existence induced by living in the kind of place described so prosaically by another character, Wallace Pfef: “I live in the flat, treeless valley where sugar beets grow. It is intemperate here. My view is a flat horizon of grays and browns” (160). In Love Medicine the fields are described as “casual and lonely” (79); in Jacklight Erdrich repeatedly stresses an almost metaphysical aspect of the landscape, as when she has the speaker in “Clouds” note that “The town stretches to fields” (43) and goes on to proclaim:

   We lay our streets over
   the deepest cries of earth
   And wonder why everything comes down to this:
   The days pile and pile.
   The bones are too few
   and too foreign to know.
   Mary, you do not belong here at all.
   Sometimes I take back in tears this whole town.
   Let everything be how it could have been, once:
   A land that was empty and perfect as clouds.

   (44-45)

   This lament for “this strange earth / we want to call ours” (45) suggests both the strong response to the landscape and the failure of The Beet Queen to present an adequate picture of the relation between character and environment, to capture the emotional tension bred by such surroundings. As a dark satirical portrait of small town life, Omensetter's Luck by William Gass seems more successful; as an image of life on the Great Plains—heavenly, hellish, beautifully empty—Terrence Malick's film Days of Heaven suggests more convincingly the haunted mood induced by the vast expanses. The Beet Queen, in a character like Karl Adare, seems to be caught between the quaintly idiosyncratic ironies of a work like Ragtime and the more compelling concern with evil that marks the writings of Flannery O'Connor.

9. Winter in the Blood is something of a special case. Alan Velie, in Four American Indian Masters (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982) 90-103, discusses the book as a comic novel, using “comic” in a slightly unusual sense, one concerned with notions of character (i.e., with the nonheroic) as well as with a humorous tone. I basically agree with his reading of the novel as a work that uses a sense of irony to play comedy against tragedy with unsettling results. It may be a comedy, but it's not a happy book.

10. In this passage, Lipsha also states that June was “left by a white man to wander off in the snow” (195). This would no doubt be how the incident appeared to June's relatives. Lipsha's statement presents another demonstration of the effect of multiple perspectives, though in this case the reader has been given an apparently privileged, “correct” view. It is also another example of the subtle introduction of essentially political issues and assumptions into a book that appears focused on personal matters.

11. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books) 83-109.

12. Leslie Marmon Silko, Storyteller (New York: Seaver Books, 1981) 247.

13. In “Writing and Revolution” Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), Roland Barthes discusses the artificiality and “convention of the real” in the Naturalist aesthetic, which he describes as “loaded with the most spectacular signs of fabrication,” and “a literature which has all the striking and intelligible signs of its identity” (73, 74, 76). Native American writing, in its efforts to attain the condition of speech, has developed a set of what might be called “conventions of the oral,” including the use of the present tense and the use of the first person with “you.” These are signs of fabrication and therefore of the literary status of the text, especially when occasional statements assigned to a character suggest the consciousness of the hidden narrator. This is most obvious when the author is most literary—usually by introducing the kind of metaphorical language that, as Barthes never fails to point out, constitutes one of the most obvious signs of a literature straining to affirm its identity. (See, for example, “Is There Any Poetic Writing?” Writing Degree Zero, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967) 47, where he speaks of “the ritual of images.”)

    For a sharp dissection of the “epidemic” use of the present tense in contemporary fiction, see “A Failing Grade for the Present Tense” William Gass, New York Times Book Review October 11, 1987: 1, 32, 36-38.

14. The Surrounded, 159, 296-97; The Death of Jim Loney (New York: Harper & Row, 1979) 175; Ceremony (New York: Penguin, 1986) 125; Fools Crow (New York: Penguin) 358-60.

15. Erdrich represents not the death of the author but, in her collaborative efforts with her husband, Michael Dorris, the birth of authorial twins. I don't wish to discuss at length the third product of their collaboration, the novel published under his name, A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (New York: Henry Holt, 1987); but in the context of the discussion of Love Medicine a few observations are in order. The multiple narratives, moving back in time from youngest to oldest, from the present to a deep secret buried in the past, seems less lively than the comparable overlapping in Love Medicine. The duplication of episodes is not entirely compensated for by the insights gained from different perspectives. The use of the first person once again provides immediacy, but at the price of keeping the reader's understanding anchored within a narrowly defined consciousness; the characters' reliance on soap opera as a standard form of references suggests both an attempt at a realistic portrayal of contemporary working class life and a lack of sureness in defining a point of view toward the melodramatic plot, which seems part I Love Lucy and part Peyton Place. As a story of three women, the book continues the Erdrich/Dorris righting of the literary balance the sexes initiated in Love Medicine and continued in Beet Queen; but the male characters are once again less interesting than the women. Finally, the book displays a fascination with the idea of storytelling, here regarded not so much as some grand social ritual but as an instrument of survival. For example Rayona, the youngest of the three narrators, tells an inquisitive priest that her mother is dead and her father is an airplane pilot, neither of which happens to be true. (The most outrageous of all the examples of this kind of story-in-a-pinch-operators in the novels is Sister Leopolda in Love Medicine. She saves herself after she has skewered Marie Lazarre by proclaiming the girl's wounds the results of a divine miracle.) Dorris has the last, oldest narrator, Aunt Ida, announce at the beginning of her narration that she will tell the story her own way, then add:

    And though I can speak their English better than they think, better than most of them, I prefer my own language. I use the words that shaped my construction of events as they happened, the words that followed my thought, the words that gave me power. My recollections are not tied to white paper. They have the depth of time.

    (273)

    A powerful statement of the antiliterary position, but a curious one to read on a printed page, in English.