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.