Departmental Bulletin Paper / 紀要論文
It Comes Up Different Every Time:
Narrative Point of View in Louise
Erdrich’s Tracks
Anthony, Piccolo
Philologia. 2011, 42, p. 119-135.
宇納進一教授退職記念号
http://hdl.handle.net/10076/11869
PHILOLOGIA 42 (2011) 119-135
It Comes Up Different Every Time:
Narrative Point of View
in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks
Anthony Piccolo
1. Introduction
Although her first novel, Love Medicine (1984), was an immediate popular and
critical success and continues to be her most well-known and best-read work, Louise
Erdrich has since proven herself to be a prolific and important contemporary American
writer with thirteen novels to date plus a range of work in other genres (e.g. poetry,
short fiction, memoir).
Her ability to employ a postmodern sensibility while writing
from the perspective of a contemporary Native American woman has attracted
significant critical and scholarly attention.
Born on June 7, 1954 in Minnesota, Erdrich was raised in North Dakota by her
French-Ojibwe mother and German-American father. Her fiction deals primarily,
though not exclusively, with the interrelations among Indians, mixed-bloods, and
whites on and around a North Dakota reservation and in the fictional town of Argus,
North Dakota1. Formally, her novels are noted for their experimental aspects: a
complex intertextuality among the novels, a fluid interweaving of past and present in
the telling of her multi-generational family sagas rather than a linear chronology, and
especially her use of multiple points of view (or “polyvocality”) as a narrative
technique.
Erdrich‟s narrative approach is often compared with William Faulkner‟s
(cf. As I Lay Dying with its fifty-nine chapters told from the first-person points of view
of fifteen different characters), and with its ten perspectives (six from first-person
points of view), Love Medicine is a prime example of Erdrich‟s use of “polyvocality.”
In Writing Tricksters, Jeanne Rosier Smith refers to Love Medicine as an “almost
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dizzying array of narrators and characters” (93-94) in which the reader is presented
with “not just numerous versions of reality but a multiplicity of realities” (93).
David Treuer (a fellow Chippewa, novelist, and a scholar of Native American
literature) runs counter to most critics of Love Medicine, particularly with regard to the
effect of Erdrich‟s use of multiple narrative points of view.
I quote a passage from
his Native American Fiction at length because of its pertinence to my discussion of
Tracks later:
The use of figurative and symbolic speech and thought by the first-person
narrators [in Love Medicine] creates a mirage of sound. It gives the appearance of
polyvocality when, in fact, all the characters share the same consciousness. . . .
There is no sense in any of the chapters that there are contested truths or contested
versions of reality. . . . Nor is there a sense . . . that the narrator or narrators are
untrustworthy.
Nor do Love Medicine’s multiple narrators . . . give us different
realities, different interpretations of the same reality. (45)
Treuer‟s views on the polyvocality (or lack thereof) in Love Medicine is a matter
of debate among readers and critics of the novel. Treuer does not discuss Erdrich‟s
third novel,
Tracks, in his book; if he did, however, I believe his critique would be
the antithesis of his evaluation of multiple narrators in Love Medicine. Rather than a
multiplicity of narrators, Tracks is divided into alternating chapters between two
narrators: Nanapush (an older, full-blooded Ojibwe) and Pauline Puyat (a young,
mixed-blood woman).
Rather than sharing “the same consciousness,” in personality
and politics, Nanapush and Pauline stand at opposite extremes to each other and speak
with noticeably distinct voices.
In the words of Susan Perez-Castillo, “the reader
shuttles between, not two different perceptions of reality, but two diametrically
different realities” (qtd. in Smith 97).
Lorena L. Stookey describes Nanapush and
Pauline as “characters who are unsympathetic and often hostile to one another, [who]
respond in very different ways to the circumstances of their times” (71).
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also differentiates Pauline‟s manner of narration from that of Nanapush‟s as the
difference between a “diatribe” and a “dramatic monologue” (71). Jeanne Rosier
Smith notes that
the narrators of Tracks are more openly hostile to each other‟s stories (each
claiming the other lies) . . . and their philosophical and social differences reflect a
community in the grip of spiritual and political crisis. (94)
The crisis confronting the Ojibwe2 in Tracks is experienced and responded to very
differently depending upon who is telling the story.
As Perez-Castillo observes,
Pauline narrates from a place of “disease, death, spiritual despair” whereas Nanapush
speaks from the position of “courageous and irreverent survivors” (qtd. in Smith 97).
Also, as Connie A. Jacobs writes, “the truth of events lies somewhere in between the
versions of these two narrators” (118). The reader does, indeed, continuously need to
“shuttle” between the two versions of reality presented by Nanapush and Pauline.
Erdrich presents us with these two essentially hostile, competing narrators and, thus,
places the reader in a position of negotiating between the narrations in search of the
truth. Although, as we shall see, our sympathies will clearly lie with Nanapush rather
than Pauline, Erdrich ensures that neither narrator is completely unbiased and
trustworthy.
What we are finally left with is a realization of the inevitable ambiguity
inherent in any accurate presentation of events. This ambiguous nature of the truth is,
I believe, the point of the novel. Before, entering into a discussion of Erdrich‟s use
of these two narrators and the reader‟s confrontation with the ambiguity, it will be
useful to first to discuss the historical background of the novel and the significance of
the moment in history when the story opens.
2. Tracks and History
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Louise Erdrich‟s novel Tracks concerns itself with events on or around the Ojibwe
Indian reservation in North Dakota between the winter of 1912 and the spring of 1924.
It could be said, however, that the story truly begins twenty-five years earlier with the
passage of the Dawes Act (or General Allotment Act) on February 8, 1887 by the
United States Congress. The purported intention of the Dawes Act was to improve
the lives of Native American Indians by encouraging assimilation with the larger white
society. To do so, the government stipulated that reservation lands (previously held
in communal ownership by the Indian tribes) would now be divided into smaller
parcels and allotted to individual families.
The plan was that individual property
ownership would encourage the abandonment of “Indian” ways of life and the
adoption of acceptable “white” means of livelihood such as farming. The actual
results, though, were what one could easily predict: the Dawes Act led not to
prosperity but to further decimation of Indian tribes.
The Dawes Act stipulated a
“grace period” of twenty-five years, during which there would be no assessment or
payment of property taxes while Indians were adapting to their new “profitable”
lifestyles.
At the end of the twenty-five years period of grace, yearly payment of
taxes would become due.
As individual Indians and families found themselves
unable to pay their property tax, the land would be put up for auction and sold.
Some
Indians who did prosper were able in increase their landholding at the cost of their
neighbors misfortune, but most often the lands went out of the tribe to white-owned
enterprises such as lumber companies.
Erdrich never directly refers to the Dawes Act; however, Tracks begins in 1912 at
the historical moment when the twenty-five year exemption on property tax payments
allowed by the Dawes Act would have ended. The first chapter is titled “Winter
1912/Manitou-geezisohns/Little Spirit Sun” (chapter titles are given in English,
Ojibwe, and in literal translation).
The opening scene of the novel takes place in late
winter. Their numbers already reduced by a previous small pox epidemic and the
usual hardships of starvation and illness brought on by North Dakota winters, the
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Ojibwe have now encountered another “white man‟s disease,” tuberculosis.
Fleur
Pillager (the central figure in the novel) has lost all of her family and lies near death
herself. Nanapush recalls how he and a member of the tribal police “found her on a
cold afternoon in late winter, out in [the] family‟s cabin near Matchimanito Lake” (T3
2). February would not be an unreasonable possibility for “late winter” and I like to
think that Nanapush rescues Fleur twenty-five years to the date of the passage of the
Dawes Act in 1887.
Again, Erdrich does not specify and there is certainly no solid
evidence to be this precise, but it would be symbolically fitting.
Fleur is now the last of the Pillagers and her rescue by Nanapush sets the plot of
the novel in motion which is driven by the impending loss of land and Fleur‟s attempt
to keep
it.
Once her health is fully recovered, Fleur (a young girl of about
seventeen at this point) moves to the fictional town of Argus with the intention of
finding work and making money to pay the now-due property tax and save the Pillager
land.
3. Nanapush and Pauline
When the story moves from the reservation to the town of Argus, the narrative
point of view switches from Nanapush to Pauline. The novel, as mentioned above, is
divided into alternating chapters between these two narrators.
It is not, however, an
equal division. As a narrator, Nanapush is privileged over Pauline. Of the nine
chapters of the novel, five are allotted to Nanapush and four to Pauline. In addition,
Nanapush narrates the odd-numbered chapters, whereas Pauline narrates the evennumbered ones. In effect, Nanapush opens and closes the novel.
It is Nanapush‟s
voice that we hear first and it is Nanapush who has the final word. Nanapush‟s
chapters are structurally more intricate and he has an advantage of perspective that
Pauline lacks.
Nanapush‟s narrative is a “frame tale”; he tells the story of the events
that take place between the winter of 1912 and the spring of 1924. However, he is
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narrating from a point at least ten years after these events take place (I will discuss the
nature of Nanapush‟s “framed” narrative in more depth below). Pauline, on the other
hand, is limited to a first-person perspective within the 1912-1924 chronological scope
of the novel. In fact, Pauline‟s point of view is further limited in that the last chapter
she narrates (chapter eight) ends in the spring of 1919. Therefore, Nanapush has the
advantage of speaking from a position of greater perspective and knowledge both
within and without the frame of his narration.
Furthermore, Nanapush is the more attractive and sympathetic character.
Nanapush, like Fleur, is the last surviving member of his family.
He stands for the
relevance of the “old ways” and the importance of family over money. He resists
mindless assimilation and in the face of an endless onslaught of government
regulations and encroaching white society he, like Fleur, resists.
For Nanapush, land
is not real estate, it is cultural continuity: “Land is the only thing that lasts life to life,”
he says.
“Money burns like tinder, flows off like water.
And as for government
promises the wind is steadier. I am a holdout, like the Pillagers” (T 33).
Pauline (approximately fifteen years old as the story begins), on the other hand, is
the daughter of half-white mother and a mixed-blood father. The racist attitudes of
the surrounding white society have become internalized and expressed in Pauline as
neurotic self-hatred.
She desires to be like her all-white Canadian grandfather; she
persuades her father to let her move to Argus and attend the Catholic missionary
school; eventually, she joins the convent herself (bypassing the “no Indians allowed”
clause by persuading herself and the church authorities that she is actually “adopted”
and not Indian at all). Her loathing of the Ojibwe (and Nanapush in particular)
becomes more extreme than that of any white character we meet in the novel.
Connie A. Jacobs refers to Pauline as “the character you love to hate” (213).
Our
sympathy with Nanapush and our revulsion towards Pauline make it easy to
unequivocally accept Nanapush as a trustworthy narrator and Pauline as untrustworthy.
As we discover in the novel, however, it is not quite as simple as this.
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Pauline‟s narrations, though, are generally more problematic (or, as I prefer, more
ambiguous) for the reader. Take, for example, Pauline‟s account of the events in
Argus.
Fleur arrives in Argus and finds a job at Kozska‟s Meats, a butcher shop.
Since wages alone will not be enough to earn the money for the tax payment on her
land, Fleur involves herself in the nightly poker games with the three butchers: Lily,
Tor, and Dutch.
Fleur, the better card player, slowly lures the men in over a number
of weeks until one night she wins big and takes them for all their money.
In a
drunken fury, the men take their revenge by attacking and (maybe) raping Fleur.
Pauline‟s account leaves room for doubt. Pauline also works at the butcher shop with
her younger cousin, Russell, doing odd jobs.
eyewitness account of what transpires.
As such, she can provide first-person,
The men pursue and catch Fleur in the
smokehouse, at which point Pauline tells us:
I closed my eyes and put my hands on my ears, so there is nothing more to describe
but what I couldn‟t block out: those yells from Russell, Fleur‟s hoarse breath, so
loud it filled me, her cry in the old language and our names repeated over and over
among the words.
(T 26)
Although, earlier, Pauline has said that she “knew everything [that happened in
Argus] . . . what they did to Fleur” (T 16), her eyewitness account becomes closer to
circumstantial evidence. Her eyes are “closed” and she covers her ears with her hands;
yet, we are told, she “couldn‟t block out” the yells and cries.
Russell, the other
possible witness, has been struck by Dutch and left “shouting and bawling in the sticky
weeds” (T 26).
What he sees or hears afterwards we are not told. Pauline holds
back on exactly what she sees or hears; her account is, at best, ambiguous. The
events of the following day, though, would seem to indicate actions motivated by
knowledge that Fleur has indeed been raped by the men.
On the morning after the
attack on Fleur, Argus is struck by a tornado. The butcher shop and much of the
town are destroyed.
The men have taken shelter in the thick-walled, ice-filled meat
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storage locker. The thick door of the locker has been locked from the outside with an
iron bolt. Days pass before the men are discovered; by which time Lily and Tor are
dead, frozen to death.
Dutch survives but is grotesquely maimed. The obvious
question is who locked the door?
revenge.
Both Pauline and Russell may have motive for
Pauline‟s account, again, is less than conclusive:
It was Russell, I am sure, who first put his arms on the bar, thick iron that was
made to slide along the wall and fall across the hasp and lock.
He strained and
shoved, too slight to move it into place, but he did not look to me for help.
Sometimes, thinking back, I see my arms lift, my hands grasp, see myself dropping
the beam into the metal grip.
At other times, the moment is erased.
But always
I see Russell‟s face the moment after, as he turned, as he ran for the door--a
peaceful look of complicit satisfaction. (T 27-28)
Pauline‟s state of mind is so complex, contradictory, and delusional that it is quite
possible that she herself is unable to decipher the truth.
relation with Fleur is anything but clear.
To begin with, Pauline‟s
Slightly older than Pauline, Fleur is
everything that Pauline is not: attractive, charismatic, confident, aware of who she is
and proud of her Indian heritage.
Pauline is, subsequently, caught between wanting
to be Fleur and wishing to destroy Fleur.
Does she not warn Fleur, as Russell wished
to do, because she is afraid or because she wishes the attack to continue?
sure Pauline knows the answer.
I am not
If she could have prevented the rape (if it did
happen) and did nothing, then trapping Fleur‟s attackers in the locker might
compensate for her guilt. On the other hand, if it were Pauline who did “lift,”
“grasp,” and “drop” the bolt in place, then Pauline is complicit in the murder of two
men. Thus, her account is tempered with “sometimes” and “at other times.”
Readers, again presented with an ambiguous account of events, are left to parse
out the truth on their own, if possible.
What we do know is that what has happened
to Fleur, the deaths of Lily and Tor, and her own involvement (whatever it may have
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been) have become a central, inescapable event in Pauline‟s life. “I left Argus,”
Pauline says, “because I couldn‟t get rid of the men.
my dreams, looking for whom to blame” (T 62).
They walked nightlong through
Years later, shortly before Pauline
takes her final vows and enters the convent, we are told (in the final chapter narrated
by Pauline): “I was cleft down the middle by my sin of those days in Argus, scored
like a lightning-struck tree” (T 195). By entering the convent, she will be “purged . . .
of Russell Kashpaw‟s hot and futile wonder, down in Argus, of the spikes of frost, the
snow ferns that grew in Dutch James‟s hair” (T 196).
4. Lulu
After Fleur returns to the reservation from Argus, she and a young man named Eli,
a member of the Kashpaw clan, become lovers and he goes to live with her at her
cabin on Matchimanito Lake.
Shortly afterwards, people notice that Fleur is pregnant.
The question on everyone‟s mind is the identity of the father. Possible candidates
include Eli, one of the men from Argus, or, as many believe, Misshepeshu, the lake
man (or monster) of Machimanito4. Nanapush tells Fleur at one point: “Pauline
Puyat‟s home again. . . . She tells a story” (T 38). To which Fleur replies: “Uncle, the
Puyat lies” (T 38).
Margaret Kashpaw, Eli‟s mother, of course wants to know more
and eventually gets the story out of Pauline.
As Nanapush relates it:
Pauline pursed her mouth and frowned, then continued. There was the butcher
shop, the cards, what happened in the smokehouse. In describing things she had
not seen her fingers wandered in the air, her voice screeched.” (T 52-53)
Nanapush underscores that Pauline‟s testimony regards things which, by her own
earlier
admission, “she had not seen.”
Furthermore, Nanapush calls into doubt
Pauline‟s ability to ever be truthful: “As I have said, she was born a liar, and sure to
die one. The practice of deception was so constant with her that it got to be a kind of
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truth” (T 53).
Nanapush contrasts himself with Pauline: “For while I was careful
with my known facts, she was given to improving the truth. . . . Pauline schemed to
gain attention by telling odd tales that created damage” (T 39).
Even Pauline refers
to her account of the Argus events as “the truth or some version of it” pulled out of her
by Margaret (T 65).
Nanapush, though, admits: “No one who saw Pauline afterwards
could doubt the good it did her to be set free of the tale. . . . For now the burden of her
secret was passed to Margaret” (T 54). Again, we the readers, are no closer to
knowing the truth about what happened in Argus, but the effect of the guilt that
Pauline has incurred (regardless of what a true account of the events may be) has been
reconfirmed.
Robert A. Morace refers to Pauline‟s account of the Argus events when pointing
out the essential difference between Nanapush‟s and Pauline‟s forms of narrative.
He
refers to Pauline‟s narrations as diatribes--conversations addressed to no particular
listener.
“Pauline‟s self-imposed isolation,” he argues, “necessitates her playing the
parts of both addresser and addressee” (52).
When she tells of the events in Argus
directly to Nanapush and Margaret, it stands out because it is such an exception to her
usual mode of narration. Nanapush, on the other hand, is narrating directly to one
specific and present listener; we, the readers, are in effect overhearing this entirely
one-sided conversation. Nanapush‟s direct audience is, of course, Lulu, Fleur‟s child.
For all five chapters that Nanapush narrates, from the first word of the novel to the
last, we need to picture Lulu as a young woman sitting in Nanapush‟s cabin across the
table from him and listening (impatiently) as he tells her the story of her mother:
“Fleur, the one you will not call mother” (T 2). It is not until the final chapter that we
learn why Lulu refuses to acknowledge Fleur as her mother.
Despite her best efforts,
Fleur is ultimately unable to maintain possession of her land.
Having failed to
protect those she loves and faced with an uncertain and possibly dangerous future,
Fleur has done what previously would have been unthinkable; she has sent Lulu away
as a child to the government school in Argus.
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Nanapush‟s chapters are his attempt to help Lulu comprehend and forgive what Fleur
has done. Nanapush‟s narration is a dialogue (albeit a one-sided one) rather than a
diatribe.
Much of the power of Nanapush‟s chapters come from our awareness of the
silent yet ever-present Lulu.
Writing about the oral, “pure” storytelling aspirations of
Love Medicine, Robert Silberman‟s observations are equally valid for Tracks: “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” (146).
Erdrich
keeps us aware of Lulu‟s presence by having Nanapush address Lulu directly
throughout his narration. He regularly addresses her directly and directs her to pay
attention (and thus directs us to pay attention to her). For example:
“Granddaughter, . . .”
(T 1)
“My girl, listen well.”
(T 32)
“You smile!” (T 40)
“This is where you come in, my girl, so listen.” (T 57)
“And now you ask how you got to be a Nanapush.” (T 60)
“You stood before me, proud, anxious. . . .”
(T 128).
“People get the grandchildren they deserve: I got you.”
(T 180)
At no point in any of Nanapush‟s direct addresses to Lulu would a reader be confused
and mistakenly assume that he or she is being addressed. However, as Catherine
Rainwater notes regarding the “oral storytelling strategies” of Tracks, Erdrich employs
a “self-conscious accommodation of cultural „outsiders‟ in the audience, and thus
converts „reader‟ to „listener‟” (145).
One effect of Nanapush‟s “dialogue” with Lulu
rather than a generic “diatribe” and of our “overhearing” of this dialogue is that
Nanapush acquires much more of our sympathy as a narrator.
He is literally less
distant and seemingly more trustworthy than Pauline. If, as Jeanne Rosier Smith puts
it, “Tracks presents the competing voices of only two characters, the consummate
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trickster old man Nanapush and the unreliable, undesirable Pauline Puyat” (94), we
easily choose to side with Nanapush.
5. Pauline: An Alternative View
Overall, critics have not been especially sympathetic towards Pauline.
Nanapush‟s influence is positive, whereas Pauline‟s is negative: “Just as Nanapush
strives through stories and trickery to hold people together, Pauline imagines stories
that separate them” (Owens 217). In Pauline‟s own words: “I see farther, anticipate
more than I‟ve heard.
The land will be sold and divided . . .” (T 204-205).
She is
untrustworthy and “because of the increasingly bizarre nature of her accounts and the
fact that she herself reports her lies, the reader doubts her reliability as a narrator”
(Beidler 185).
Or, simply, she is an “earnestly obsessive and humorless young
woman [who] is portrayed as lacking an ability to ever draw upon laughter‟s saving
grace” (Stookey 83), as opposed to Nanapush, an archetypal trickster. As the novel
progresses, Pauline becomes increasingly focused on division rather than communion
with society.
After her religious “conversion,” she emotionally and psychologically
distances herself from the Ojibwe reservation community: “„The Indians,‟ I said now,
„them.‟ Never neenawind or us.
And I soon found it was good that I did” (T 138).
Yet, it is not as simple as saying that Nanapush is a reliable narrator who can be
trusted and Pauline is not.
Pauline refers to Nanapush as “the smooth-tongued
artificer” (T 196). In The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, Father
Damien, now in his nineties, responding to questions regarding Pauline (now Sister
Leopolda), answers: “I should tell you [Nanapush] was not entirely to be trusted where
the Puyats were concerned. He had his motives for spinning a tale to his own ends-he loved to torment Pauline” (148).
Connie A. Jacobs, furthermore, points out that
Nanapush and Pauline each “accurately characterize the other, Pauline stressing how
much Nanapush loves to talk while Nanapush proclaims that once Pauline opens her
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mouth, she cannot contain her words” (118).
What they say, the purpose, and the
effect may be diametrically opposed, but there is a similarity in the proclivity for
talking.
Remarkably and ironically, Nanapush and Pauline occasionally seem to be
expressing the same sentiment.
John Purdy writes about Pauline‟s “profound
revelation” that “[p]ower travels in the bloodlines, handed out before birth” (31).
Although Pauline is far from a reliable narrator, Purdy rightly claims that “her insight
here is reiterated by other characters, including Nanapush and the community at large,
for which the fear and respect for Fleur is ubiquitous” (21).
In fact, in what I would
deem a relevant mistake, Louis Owens in his book on the American Indian novel,
Other Destinies, attributes the line to Nanapush rather than Pauline (215).
The
statement about power and bloodlines sounds so much like Nanapush that one can
hardly blame him for the error.
Finally, referring to the rumors and gossip
concerning Lulu‟s paternity, “the old men talk[ing], turning the story over,” it is
Pauline who proclaims: “It comes up different every time, and has no ending, no
beginning.
They get the middle wrong too.
anything” (T 31).
They only know they don‟t know
Compare this with Nanapush‟s comment three pages later on how
Lulu came to be a Nanapush: “There is a story to it the way there is a story to all,
never visible while it is happening” (T 34).
6. Conclusion
As we can see from the examples of Nanapush and Pauline, one of the hallmarks
of Louise Erdrich‟s writing is a reluctance to provide her readers with pat answers and
definitive truths.
Nanapush and Pauline‟s values, personalities, and experience of the
world may be antithetical; Pauline may be, indeed, the “character we love to hate”; yet,
she surprises us at times by speaking what feels to us (and must also to Nanapush) to
be true: “power travels in the bloodlines” and those speculating about Lulu “only
know they don‟t know anything.”
If Erdrich appears purposefully ambiguous on
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matters such as Lulu‟s parentage or precisely what we are to make of someone like
Pauline, that is exactly the point.
The “polyvocal” aspect of Erdrich‟s fiction is one
way by which she involves the reader in creating the story.
To quote Jeanne Rosier
Smith again on the structure of Erdrich‟s novels, the multiple perspectives of Erdrich‟s
narratives “draw in the reader as one of the community of listeners” (91). To read a
novel such as Tracks or Love Medicine is to become out of necessity an active
participant in the tale.
It is always going to be up to us, the readers, to negotiate our
way through the texts of the novels and ferret out what may be the truth and be
satisfied that, at times, the truth will continue to elude us.
One of the most representative (and moving) scenes in Tracks comes at the end of
chapter three shortly after the birth of Lulu.
birth registration for the church records.
Father Damien arrives to complete the
He needs the father‟s name. Margaret and
Fleur are unavailable, so it is up to Nanapush. Before he speaks, though, he reflects
on his position as an old man, the last of his clan, with no descendants; he remembers
his wives and children who have died from disease and starvation; he tells himself that
Eli is still young; he considers the fact that Lulu‟s paternity is already uncertain:
There were so many tales, so many possibilities, so many lies. The waters were
so muddy.
I thought I‟d give them another stir. “Nanapush,” I said. “And her
name is Lulu.” (T 61)
Nanapush‟s answer is a lie, of course, but it is a fabrication intended to “hold people
together” rather than “separate them.”
Nanapush feels he has “the opportunity to
speak now and the right” (T 61) and his own personal motives (“Lulu” was the
nickname given to his youngest daughter, now dead).
However, Nanapush‟s lie
(which fools no one) also serves the purpose of ensuring that the past connects with
the present (and future) by connecting Lulu officially to the tribe and giving her an
identity.
For the record, she is a Nanapush.
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Anthony Piccolo
It Comes Up Different Every Time: Narrative Point of View in Louise Erdrich‟s Tracks
In her essay, “History, Postmodernism, and Louise Erdrich‟s Tracks,” Nancy J.
Peterson writes:
Both Nanapush‟s and Pauline‟s narratives suggest that history is not objective and
impartial, as traditional documentary historians assert.
the interests of a particular party or ideology.
It is always constructed in
(991)
Erdrich‟s use in Tracks of two narrators with competing views, her insistence on the
value of ambiguity in the text, and her refusal to tell the “truth” foregrounds the
subjective and partial nature of the telling of events.
Pauline‟s versions of what
happened in Argus are colored by her own involvement and sense of responsibility and
subsequent guilt.
Fleur knows but isn‟t saying. The identity of Lulu‟s father is
“officially” Nanapush.
side with Nanapush.
Given the choice between the two narrators, most readers will
In the end we accept that Nanapush, as well as Pauline, has a
particular agenda behind the stories he tells; it‟s just that most readers prefer
Nanapush‟s agenda over Pauline‟s.
depend on the teller.
Tracks shows us that the tale does, indeed,
For Native Americans, even more than most, the knowledge
that the narrating of events is not objective and impartial continues to be especially
relevant.
Notes
1.
Those novels generally considered part of Erdrich‟s interrelated “North Dakota” novels
are indicated here with an *.
Shadow Tag (2010)
The Red Convertible: Collected and New Stories 1978-2008 (2009)
*The Plague of Doves (2008)
The Painted Drum (2005)
*Four Souls (2004)
The Master Butchers Singing Club (2003)
*The Last Report of the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001)
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Anthony Piccolo
It Comes Up Different Every Time: Narrative Point of View in Louise Erdrich‟s Tracks
The Antelope Wife (1998)
*Tales of Burning Love (1996)
*The Bingo Palace (1994)
*Love Medicine: New and Expanded Version (1993)
The Crown of Columbus (with Michael Dorris) (1991)
*Tracks (1988)
*The Beet Queen (1986)
*Love Medicine (1984)
In addition, Erdrich has also written young adult and children‟s literature, nonfiction, and
three volumes of poetry.
2.
The appropriate choice of terminology can be confusing.
Chippewa, Chippewe,
Chippeway, Ojibwa, Ojibwe, and Ojibway are all acceptable Anglicized versions of the
name used to refer to the various bands of Native peoples living throughout the northern
United States (primarily Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Dakota, and Montana)
and southern Canada (primarily Ontario, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan), with Ojibwa
used more in Canada and Chippewa more in the United States. The word used by
Ojibwe people to refer to themselves, though, is the autonym Anishinabe (plural
Anishinabeg) or, roughly, “First People.”
However, for the sake of clarity and
consistency and because it is the term that Erdrich herself seems to prefer most often in
her fiction (although she refers to herself as Chippewa), I will refer to the people and their
language as Ojibwe throughout this paper.
3.
References to Tracks will be cited throughout this paper as: T.
4.
Although Eli will be generally acknowledged and accepted as Lulu‟s father, we never
know for sure who her father is.
In Tracks, Pauline offers contradictory testimony. On
one hand, she relates that Lulu‟s “green eyes and skin the color of an old penny have
made more talk, as no one can decide if the child is mixed blood or what . . .” (31). Yet,
on the other hand, she tells us that “[Lulu] had the Kashpaw‟s unmistakeable nose, too
wide and squashed on the tip” (70). When Lulu reappears as an old woman in The
Bingo Palace and her grandson, Lipsha, asks her directly who her father was, she “turns,
arches her thin black eyebrows, and gives the pan [of simmering berries] a sudden,
annoyed shake” (129).
She refuses to say.
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Lipsha never finds out and neither do we.
Anthony Piccolo
It Comes Up Different Every Time: Narrative Point of View in Louise Erdrich‟s Tracks
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