In her book LaRose Louise Erdrich includes a line which reads as follows: “in English there was a word for every object. In Ojibwe there was a word for every action. English had more shades of personal emotion, but Ojibwe had more shades of family relationship” (LR, 191). The line introduces to readers Erdrich’s challenge of communicating Ojibwe life through the medium of the novel and the English written word. Louise Erdrich’s books LaRose and Love Medicine convey the cultural syncretism on the reservation and of post-colonial Indigenous life by engaging a fragmented narrative structure. This fragmentation of storytelling invites the reader to question how Erdrich might be using non-linguistic literary techniques to configure the written English word to represent what is referenced when the Ojibwe language is spoken. This narrative choice additionally challenges the traditional protagonist centrality in novels by deploying multiple narrators and inviting the reader into a disorienting world. The reader rather than the protagonist will order and derive meaning from a multiplicity of stories and voices. Erdrich uses depictions of the natural world to blur the lines of the metaphorical and the metaphysical, subjecting readers to a process of ordering the world similar to that of her characters. This collapse of how time and space are to be experienced almost acts as a transliteration of Ojibwe oralities into written English and ultimately is used to represent syncretism of European and Indigenous ways of life.
In Love Medicine, Erdrich includes a moment that depicts how Albertine derives narrative, and thus meaning, from time and space. Albertine thinks that “everything seemed to be one piece… As if the sky were a pattern of nerves and our thoughts and memories traveled across it. As if the sky were one gigantic memory” (LM, 37). Erdrich uses this character/narrator’s contemplation as a device for Erdrich to convey how she anticipates readers to make sense of her writing. She suggests that despite temporal incongruities between Love Medicine’s different narrator’s stories, the elements or substance of these stories operate simultaneously to provide meaning to readers and shape existence for characters. Prior to its compilation into and social consideration as a novel, Love Medicine existed as short stories. Its form and narrative have been fragmented from its impetus. To bring these short stories into a novel where readers can tease out a unified narrative or message, the reader must look beyond the multiple narrators and temporalities depicted by Erdrich in Love Medicine.
Erdrich thrusts upon readers an ordering and an analysis of her text through material rather than chronology by deploying multiple narrators to express Love Medicine’s story(ies). By using multiple narrators, narrators become characters and vice-versa. For example, the first chapter of Love Medicine is initially narrated in the third person and tells the story of June’s death. Then the chapter is narrated in the first person by Albertine, and finally Erdrich allows Albertine to open up her narration to include and become almost entirely constructed by a series of quotes from different characters/family members, most of whom claim narrator-status within the following chapters of Love Medicine. The first person narration from Albertine as well as the kitchen table discussion in this chapter serve to construct and convey the identity of June to the reader. However, this isn’t initially clear as the stories told at the kitchen table appear almost at random and are often lacking overt reference to June.
Though June is no longer living at this moment in the book’s chronology, her identity continues to be formed and shaped as those with relationships to her express or absorb different stories. Because the chapter opens with June, we understand that the chapter will be about her. We are surprised when she is neither the narrator nor the overt object of discussion. But because of the structure of this chapter, its origins being an omniscient description of the actions of June, we maintain the notion that this chapter intends to construct the identity of June. Erdrich communicates to her readers that we are to conceive of June’s identity through the words being said and the words’ speakers’ relationship to the character. Erdrich confirms that narrative does not belong to any singular person and that construction of meaning is rather a collaborative process.
Like Love Medicine, LaRose adopts a non-chronological narrative structure and begins with a death. Erdrich’s fragmentation of narrative aids in representing the natural disordering or collapse of meaning that often follows death. The fragmented narrative’s disregard of time as chronological also serves to represent the disordering of meaning inherent to Indigenous experience in america, as Indigenous representations have long been marked by death. Erdrich allows us to become wrapped up in the singular tragedies and the more personal, interior traumas of the 80s and early 2000s depicted in these two books, but she is quick to remind us of history. Yet these historical narratives do not aim to define Ojibwe identity in a language of death, but rather provide context for a multiplicity of narrator’s responses to trauma. As narrative fragmentation is deployed, space that novels traditionally leave open for a protagonist is filled by a collective meaning constructed from themes that are repeated across multiple narratives. In LaRose and Love Medicine, the most obvious throughline would appear to be the idea that cultural syncretism has been fostered as a trauma response or tactic of self-preservation of the Ojibwe community. Expressing the multiplicity of Ojibwe characters’ and narrators’ actions and emotions through the written English language forces a constant confrontation of Indigenous existence within European systems of ordering and organizing. Additionally, Erdrich understands her audience’s familiarity with chronological narrative structures. By organizing LaRose and Love Medicine so readers first confront violent death, we are conditioned by our familiarity with chronological sequencing of novels to understand the rest of these two books as responding to death. Erdrich uses narrative fragmentation to remind readers that cultural syncretism exists only in response to colonialism. She uses her novel to illuminate and applaud the Ojibwe resilience, yet through this narrative structure she does not allow her audience to forget that syncretism as a form of resilience exists as an identity only in the wake of violence.
Erdrich engages the theme of syncretism as a resilient yet reactive identity through LaRose’s and Love Medicine’s motif of boarding schools. In Love Medicine’s chapter ‘The Island’ Erdrich writes Lulu’s narration to detail Lulu’s experience of being forced into and eventually escaping one of the government schools. Lulu’s narration details the interior response to a solely English education. This pedagogical tactic aimed to eradicate Indigenous languages with the understanding that Ojibwe holds a particular relationship to community, history, and land. Lulu explains the experience of returning to the reservation after her years spent at the boarding school, “I saw the leaves of the poplars applaud high in the wind. I saw the ducks barrel down, reaching to the glitter of the slough water. Wind chopped the clouds to rolls that rose and puffed whiter, whiter. Blue Juneberry tough, diamond willow. I watched my own face float over the grass, traveling alongside me in the dust of the bus window” (LM, 69). Erdrich uses this moment to illustrate what happens to Indigenous identity when it expresses itself through the medium of the English language. This confrontation of Lulu and the reservation’s landscape comes after she has forcibly absorbed Euro-american modes of existence. It makes sense, then, that Erdrich depicts Lulu seeing the natural world through and as a mirror of the self. This authorial choice reflects the idea that English is concerned with objects and personal emotion (LR, 191). When we make something an object, we make it the ‘other.’ We transform something with its own unique, expressive identity into something in which we can cast our interior selves upon. In this moment of Lulu’s narration Erdrich depicts how the forced use of the English language at these boarding schools alters Lulu’s relationship to space, and thus to herself and her history.
Later in the book but earlier in chronology, prior to when Lulu leaves the reservation for school, her relationship to space appears to be different. She describes how “[she’d] hear the wind rushing, rolling, like the far-off sound of waterfalls. Then [she’d] open [her] mouth wide, [her] ears wide, [her] heart, and [she’d] let everything inside” (LM, 276). In this quote Lulu thinks about her surroundings through the Ojibwe language. She sees the natural as active, antimate, and containing a history that she absorbs as she lets in its expressions. When she gazes upon the reservation’s nature after attending the government school her gaze extracts meaning from her surroundings using a syncretic language of English and Ojibwe. This mirrors a challenge that Erdrich continuously contends with in her writing. How is Erdrich supposed to depict a particular relationship to/ordering of the world through a language and medium that is antithetical to that relationship? One of the ways Erdrich addresses this question is by writing so as to confuse the material, the metaphorical, and the metaphysical.
If we were to understand Lulu’s quote from page 69 as a material description, we would take Erdrich’s description of Lulu’s face traveling alongside her as Lulu’s recognition of her reflection in the bus’ dirty window. When we view this moment as metaphor or metaphysical we understand that Erdrich creates this image to represent Lulu’s fragmented identity following her forced assimilation. Though similar conclusions are drawn by approaching this depiction of Lulu as metaphor versus as metaphysical, the two approaches engage different facets of the English and Ojibwe languages. To understand this moment as a metaphor for the effects of the boarding school on Lulu, we approach the moment through English literary traditions which center logic and rationality. We understand metaphor as a prescriptive gaze. Objects mirror our interior states, but we continue to believe objects to be inexpressive. When we view this moment as a metaphysical experience, however, we take Lulu’s post-school identity to exist as spiritually and materially fragmented. If we choose to see this as a metaphysical experience we engage the Ojibwe language’s potential for breathing life into objects, and viewing the inanimate as autonomous, expressive, and holding the capacity to impact people. The distinctions between metaphorical and metaphysical are similarly interesting on page 276, when Lulu opens herself up so that the world can enter her. To understand this moment as metaphor is to give power to the personal and psychological. Metaphor understands the world as a stagnant collection of objects until Lulu/Erdrich provide such objects with meaning through a projection of the singular, interior self upon them. To understand this moment as metaphysical, however, is to accept that the world is in motion and always holds relationships to itself, and thus always has meaning.
Erdrich’s use of multiple narrators and fragmentation disrupts readers’ usual approach to derive a novel’s message from its protagonist. A protagonist is able to convey the meaning of objects through projections of their psychological interior onto the natural world. When Erdrich replaces the protagonist with multiple narrators, the typical expressive character vs absorbent setting dynamic is confused. When we read, we inherently bring a notion of humans as autonomous beings to our analyses. Erdrich’s use of multiple protagonists does not attempt to invert this dynamic. Rather, the multiple narrators create a harmony between the natural and human worlds. In this harmony, there is space for everything to speak, for everything to have language.
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