Telling the Story from Different Angles-Louise Erdrich

Last semester I read Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich, and this month I read her subsequent novel, Tracks, published four years after Love Medicine but set at least a generation prior to the stories of Love Medicine. Tracks' stories and personalities provide answers to some of the character questions in Love Medicine (the sinister Leopolda/Pauline character, for instance) and retroactively complete a complex history upon which the action of Love Medicine emerges. What is remarkable is how the novels stand alone in spite of their reverse-sequel relationship and their narrative similarities, and both imbued with the palpable texture of a community unraveling with history.  The novels employ a similar method of telling a complex story: alternating narrations. While in Love Medicine, there are four narrators that alternate throughout the novel, Tracks only uses two narrative voices: Nanapush and Pauline. Because the core of the story is about the changing Indian community and the loss of the past way of life, the story is complex with many villains and heros, all having both lost and betrayed in their own ways. Pauline and Nanapush are opposite poles, in a way, of their own stories and of that of the community. Thus, Erdrich's use of both of their stories--told from their own points of view--to tell a more round and complete version of the story of the community's loss and change. 

When considering the use of this narrative structure and how to describe it in words, I kept conjuring mental images of Fernando Botero's paintings of round, swollen people who, as he explains, are not fat but whole. Botero, like earlier cubist painters and, I think, like Erdrich, paints all sides of a figure into dwo dimensional space. They appear swollen because their painter is showing more sides of them than we are able to see all at once. In this way, the story of the subject is, though perhaps unreal, more complete. We feel their texture of the dancers, pictured above, because Botero has represented their volume onto a flat page.  In this 

image of a guitar (by Bracques) the guitar's "story" is constructed using pieces that come together as something with elements of a common guitar, but perhaps with more emotional resonance connected to a guitar and the sounds it makes than would a realist picture of the instrument.

Erdrich builds Tracks with pieces like this, using the technique, first and foremost, of multiple narrations. Piece by piece, personal and collective histories are built throughout time, both in the world of the reservation and in that of the reader. Nanapush, the elder character, begins his story (all addressed to his estranged daughter, Lulu) by talking about the way it was. This sets the tone for: things have changed. Nanapush says, "My girl, I saw the passing of times you will never know." He talks, too, of those that had died: "Their names grew within us, swelled to the brink of our lips, forced our eyes open in the middle of the night. We were filled with the water of the drowned, cold and black, airless water that lapped against the seal of our tongues or leaked slowly from the corners of our eyes." Nanapush's story is one of loss and having watched a long process of death and change unfold. Because he is speaking to his granddaughter, who has left the reservation at a young age and knows little about the world of the reservation and what has passed, he is able to explain things to her that we, as readers, also need to know. Nanapush gets the first word, and the reader feels the loss that he feels, and the betrayal. At the end of his section he writes, "I was never one to take notice of the talk of those who fattened in the shade of the new Agent's storehouse." There are people to blame, villains of Nanapush's story. And then comes Pauline.

Of course, Pauline is not one of those who directly profited from Nanapush's and the rest of the tribe's loss. She is a villain, however, in her rejection of her past and her desire to wipe out the old ways and their proponents in the name of Christ and the Church. Because of her love for Fleur and her inability to possess her (and later the same with Fleur's husband Eli) Pauline attempts to destroy them. Later, in her incarnation as Leopolda the Nun in Love Medicine, she is one of the most thoroughly evil and terrifying creatures I've ever encountered in literature.

 And yet, every villain has her sorrow. And every villain also has her own villain. For when we first meet Pauline, it is her retrospective account of herself as an admiring young girl in the nearby town of Argus, while those stayed on the reservation are dying from consumption. She says, "Sometimes in my head I had a dream I could not shake. i saw my sisters and my mother swaying in the branches, buried too high to reach, wrapped in lace I never hooked. I tried to stop myself from remembering what it was like to have companions, to have my mother and sisters around me, but when Fleur came to us that June, I remembered." Pauline, too, had lost a great deal and was alone in the world. She loved the mystical Fleur, who acted toward her once with the tenderness of a mother, and when Fleur hustled the men in a poker match and they went after her, the little Pauline struggled in her defense. To avenge Fleur, Pauline locked the men in the icehouse during a tornado, where they froze. Pauline carried this grief, and the loss of Fleur's love, with her through her life. It is smart on Erdrich's part that she uses two names for Pauline, who later becomes Leopolda. If she were to introduce the young girl as Leopolda, anyone who had already ready Love Medicine would not be able to find tenderness for the character. But when a new character is introduced, we want to have compassion for them, and we do with Pauline. And when we find out that it is she who becomes Leopolda (though this became apparent to me earlier on than the final revelation of this fact), we find retroactive compassion for Leopolda the lost, the broken, the loneliest soul on God's earth. 

These characters differences (age, gender, spiritual centers, personalities) mean that they experience the changes that occur very differently, which of course makes the story more complete. No one person's version of loss is the whole story--and sometimes it takes their foils or their counterweights to complete it. Having the two oppositional characters telling the story certainly makes the world of the reservation more vivid and complicated. Through Pauline, we have direct entry into the world of the convent and the role that Christianity plays in the unraveling of the community, and through Nanapush, we learn about the spirit world, referred to as "the old ways", that guides so many in the reservation world. 

Eli's affair with Sophie is a perfect example of the manner in which Erdrich rounds and swells her story using multiple narration. Sophie is the young daughter of Bernadette, the woman who has taken Pauline in. When Fleur's husband Eli rejects Pauline's bony advances, Pauline hatches a plan to use Sophie to tempt Eli, thus spiting Fleur and living vicariously through Sophie's affair. Using charms and "medicine", Pauline uses the two as puppets for her whims. Fleur immediately knows what happens and casts a spell on Sophie and shuts Eli out. Pauline realizes what she's done, and says, "I work[ed] my mind back and forth on the problem like a saw, until at last I had it all in pieces and I understood that I couldn't put it back together." From Pauline's point of view, we see the event of betrayal itself, and her own repentance and subsequent move toward the church. She also sees Eli as he comes to Fleur, and says, "...he pumped himself full of false bravery. It was visible, the way he did this...perhaps I had watched something change in him, right there, from boy to man, from man to deceiver of women....when he stepped near and laid his hand upon her arm she simply moved her arm away. That's when he knew. He turned and retreated, left the door hanging open behind. We didn't hear which way he went through the woods." Where he goes is to Nanapush, for guidance and for sympathy. At Nanapush's, we see Eli as no more than a foolish boy--whereas through the eyes of Pauline, he is a man, a tough deceiver of women, an object of sexual desire and a symbol of masculinity that does not notice her. Nanapush says, "After six days I could not bear to hear any more from Eli. Each day of snow seemed endless, trapped with a sulking boy."With these two visions of Eli, he becomes a complete person, his character is filled with complications and contradictions endemic to the human psychic anatomy.

Erdrich's use of multiple narrators allows for a piecing together different elements of a story, different versions of what happened, different significances of events passed, different understandings of fellow characters and different relationships to the changing community. Like this, the story is both unreal (like the swollen dancers or the patchwork guitar) and in some ways more real, in that more sides of the story are told. Story, this way, or community history, is nonlinear and centered more around feeling than it is around fact. 

Backstory-Only What We Need to Know

The backstory is often a place where the story gets lost. There feels a need (I find this in my own writing process) to explain everything into being: "But before I tell you that, you should know…" and "And the reason she was like this is because when she was a child…" This may be a necessary part of the writing process, for some writers, but it also, in the words of Xu Xi, must be revisted and "slashed and burned." Writing "This had happened once before" is often more powerful alone than with a subsequent paragraph that begins, "The first time it happened had been when she was seven…" Amy Hempel is a master of this. She shows how a frontstory and backstory can work together to create a whole story, how a backstory can be used succinctly to inform the character and the reality in which she (or he) lives.

One method Hempel uses to minimize the meandering backstory is the non-linear narrative. Hempel's stories are often constructed with disparate blocks of time, with fragmented memories or moments that congeal only toward the end, that are linked with only a few recurring words. Backstory pieces mixed in with frontstory pieces, so that they are all frontstory and backstory at the same time. In "Tom Rock Through The Eels", for example, the narrator separates her story with white spaces. First, we get the story of her mother and the bribe she gave her daughter to swim down for the Tom rock. Second, we see the grown daughter sleeping in her father's bed and remembering her dead mother. Third is her grandmother, and the grandmother's pain of losing her daughter. These are disparate, non-linear memories, but they are held together by the memory of the dead mother and the family members' singular and collective pain around the issue. But the story is also held together with other small details. The father section begins: "In California, you are not supposed to sleep beneath bookshelves or paintings or mirrors on the wall." In the grandmother's section (the entire fourth paragraph): "My grandmother sleeps beneath a portrait of her daughter." In this way, Hempel tells a far-reaching story but with incredible economy of words. The backstory and the frontstory are one. We feel the singular and collective pain of the mother/daughter/wife's loss without a long history of each of these relationships and the particular holes left. We don't need to—the small details we get let us know: these holes are present. We feel them.

The fourth section of the story is just this: "My mother said, 'What?' I said, 'I forgot. I forgot what I was going to say.' 'Then it must have been a lie," my mother said.'" This short paragraph gives us no backstory, but tells us a great deal. This is a paragraph about memory, and what it means to forget. The larger story is about remembering the narrator's mother, and other mothers, and about trying to remember "the good things". We are not told where they are when this event occurs, or how old either the mother or the daughter is. It could be on the mother's deathbed, it could be driving the car. Did the daughter ever remember? We don't know. Details are not extrapolated, here. Hempel doesn't tell us, because what she does is distil the moment. Details are extraneous: the point is only what she has left. Backstory, then, in both the story's form and figuratively in the daughter's life, is gone.

Another place we see this is in "Church Cancels Cow." In this short two-page story, the woman walks her dog in the cemetery across from her house. Another woman gets angry because she has found "faces"—feces—on her mother's grave and thinks it to be the woman's dog. They fight, and the other woman follows the woman with the dog. The woman with the dog lies and says that she has relatives buried in the cemetery, when she doesn't. "For peace of mind I will lie about anything at any time." This is where the backstory comes in. "In fact, she says, she has counted three dogs the other day from her car. Like counting cows, in the game I played in cars when the family went out on long drives. My brother and I were told to count cows in the fields we passed along the way…" The sister (after this short paragraph, she is grounded as a person with a relationship—she has a brother, and so is now not just a woman but a sister) remembers the game one way, but her brother reminds her: it was cemetery that cancels cow, not a church, in that counting game they played as children. So the backstory we are given leads us back to the present moment, in which the lying woman is making peace with the woman who found feces on her mother's grave (this character entered the story as a daughter, rather than just as a woman with a dog). The backstory paragraph, if we can call it that, does not give us a lot of information. Was the brother older or younger? Where were they going on the drives? Where did they live? Who would generally win the game? There was no specific anecdote, just a generalized "we would play this game." The specifics that are left out don't matter. What matters is: the cemetery cancels things, it erases, it makes the woman with the dog start over in her counting.

What do backstories add? Backstory seems to be a method useful for the writer to ground his or herself in time, in place, to explore where the character has been before he/she has arrived at the moment of import, that is, the moment that is the center of the story. Stories are stronger without a long backstory, and Hempel shows us how the necessary information of past can be communicated without the heavy-handed "And the other thing you should know,"s or the "One more thing I'd like to tell you"s to which writers (including myself) are sometimes prone.

This method if distillation of the backstory to the essential, the "need to know" information that propels the story forward, shows a great deal of trust in the reader. We don't have to know where or when the conversation happened, or what happened to the brother later, or where they lived, or what kind of sickness she had—unless we need to. The "information" of it is extraneous if it doesn't round the character; it is also extraneous if it pumps a character so full if rounding devices and complete histories that he or she pops. As readers, we are happy with what we are given, and happy when a writer like Hempel trusts us to trust her with the details she gives, and nothing more.