Tracking Mythology, Identity and Family.

Part of our assignment for my Senior Seminar class (the class for which I have read the past four books) was to familiarize ourselves with Chippewa myth and also to come to class able to talk about several critical approaches to this text. Google searches did not turn up very reliable sources on Chippewa myth, so I ended up looking at several books in Ames (Illinois Wesleyan's library) on Ojibwa religion and mythology. A few books had some really good information about the creation myth which is centered around Nanabozho who is also known as Nanapush. These myths obviously have relevance since Nanapush is also the name of one of the narrators of the novel. The Water Monster, Mishebeshu, is also a major figure in Chippewa myth and appears in the novel as the Lake Man who Fleur is purportedly in league with. Water and wind also figure heavily in the mythology. Wind is personified by four brothers who are controlled at various times by Nanapush through his tricks. All these motifs play heavy roles in the narrative and are worth brushing up on if you were previously unaware of their significance.

There are a lot of parallels between Tracks and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. Both novels feature non-white protagonists attempting to find their identity and happiness in a society dominated by whites. Tracks differs from Song of Solomon because the characters in Tracks are trying to keep alive their own society and are in touch with their traditional culture. The characters in Song of Solomon try to get back in touch with a culture they never knew and are trying to subsist within white society rather than creating their own. Ultimately, African-Americans are Americans since they were bereft of their own heritage for so long. Native Americans on the other hand were left their culture but not their land. Yet that does not mean that the characters in Tracks are in any less of a search for their identity, especially the young. Characters like Pauline, Fleur, Eli and Nector Kashpaw watch their culture fail to survive in the face of western oppression and greed. They struggle to reconcile what they are being told by their elders, what they believe about their heritage and the realities they face every day. Much like Milkman and Guitar try to orient their history and their family's history within their current experiences, the youth in Tracks do the same with a much more concrete reminder of what was.

The narrative also illuminates the damage done to the traditional family/clan structure which was very important in Native culture. None of the main characters have a nuclear family intact. In particular, there is a distinct absence of biological fathers in the text. Even Eli's status as Lulu's biological father is put into question. The families have been destroyed by disease, alcohol and hardship. As a result there is no hierarchy of authority or an established process for decision making. There is no natural check to improper behavior or built in defense against the encroaching lumber company. In-fighting features heavily in the novel as the Native community comes under constant attack from both internal and external pressures. I believe those threats are only made possible by the disintegration of the family and the loss of authority that results. Before that disintegration, there is no possible way the Lazarre and Morrisey boy assault Margaret Kashpaw like they do. Nor is Nector allowed to betray Fleur in the way he does. The break down of the family robs the community of its ability to protect itself. Nanapush, Fleur, and the Kashpaws do what they can to form a substitute family, but it can only do so much and the bonds are not as strong as blood.

I am writing a longer paper on this book that will touch upon the ideas I have sketched out in here. I am going to compare Pauline from Tracks's and Macon Dead from Song of Solomon's attempt to find their identity and how that attempt impacts their status within the community. I'll probably post a few updates from the paper at various points, but I also hope to continue to read and make posts about other books. Right now, my agenda is to post about W.P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe and Love Medicine.

Tracking Erdrich

Tracks is Louise Erdrich's third novel and includes the same characters from the first two, Love Medicine and the Beat Queen. Even though it is the third published novel, it is not an extension of the story lines from the first two but rather a prequel to Love Medicine. Apparently Tracks was the first novel Erdrich started writing but either shelved it to write the other two or just published it last. Either way, anyone who has read Love Medicine and/or the Beat Queen needs to pick up this book and delve into the events leading up to those two books. I have only read a part of Love Medicine in another class, but my brief exposure to it really made me appreciate how revealing Tracks is.

For anyone who is not familiar with Erdrich's trilogy, Tracks still stands up fantastically on its own. It took me a while to become oriented in the text, so I enjoyed the second half of the book far more than the first. That phenomenon would probably be resolved by reading the other two books first, but I do not think it is necessary. The story centers around a Native American woman, Fleur and the destruction of the community she is apart of from internal and external pressures. The story is told through two narrators, Grandfather Nanapush and Pauline Puyat, who switch off between chapters. Nanapush is telling the story to Fleur's daughter Lulu but I am still unclear as to who Pauline is telling her story to. It is clear that choosing to structure the novel as a frame narrative was very deliberate since the act of story telling is incredibly important to Native American tradition. The frame narrative also gives the reader reason to question the narrators' reliability though as both Pauline and Nanapush lie or are accused of lying at different points of the text.

We begin with Nanapush recounting how he rescued Fleur as a young girl when her entire household succumb to disease. She is a Pillager, a feared family considered in league with the Lake Man who lives in Machimato (the lake in the reservation). She and her brother Moses were the only survivors from an outbreak of tuberculosis. Only Nanapush was brave enough to go into the house and bring Fleur out. He takes he home to live with him as his daughter and her brother is taken in by another family but he eventually leaves the community entirely and lives by himself in the woods as a medicine man. Fleur herself is only half tamed and is described in both male and female terms. When she is old enough, she heads into the local white town, Argus, to earn enough money to pay the allotment tax to the government on her family ancestral property. Here the narrative switches over to Pauline, who is a mixed blood and does not feel at home among the tribe. She convinces what is left of her family to send her into town so she can learn to make lace with the nuns. She is sent to town but ends up sweeping the floor of the butcher shop which Fleur ends up working in rather than learning to make lace.

Already you can see some of the binary aspects of the text emerge. The two narrators, one being male and the other female, one telling the story to a child about things taking place in the native community, the other possibly telling it to no one for no other reason than her own vanity about the white community. Yet it is important not to get too caught up in the binary divisions of this novel because nothing is black and white. It is a western temptation to draw hard lines between characters and characteristics. In the Native tradition Characters frequently possess contradictory traits. In Chippewa mythology, Nanapush is also the name of the primary agent in the creation story. He is often described as Culture-hero and trickster which are difficult to reconcile if you are judging him in a binary sense. There is not the same sense of pure good and pure evil in Native culture, life is more of a mixture of a variety of traits. Having said all that, Erdrich is mixed and has grown up with both traditions, including a large exposure to Catholicism. So binary oppositions and judgments do not need to be thrown out the window entirely, but it is helpful to ignore your first impulse to classify characters as either this or that and familiarize yourself with some Chippewa culture and myth to really understand what is happening in the text.

Between the two narrators, we follow the formation of a new family structure with Fleur at its center. Nanapush's mentee, Eli Kashpaw, becomes enamored with Fleur when she returns from Argus and eventually becomes her lover. Eli moves into the Pillager homestead and Fleur gives birth to Lulu. Margaret Kashpaw, Eli's mother, initially disapproves of the match, but with the arrival of her granddaughter, she comes around as well. Margaret and Nanapush develop a relationship and a family is formed from the remnants of many other families. Pauline eventually becomes a nun and has her own place in this family despite being unwanted. The story follows to communities struggle to stay afloat amid pressure from a white logging company who wants their land. Their bonds are tested and broken at various points of the text as they try to figure out how to navigate in a world which is white dominated while holding onto their Native American identity, if they can. I will leave this post here as mostly a summary and pick up a new post in the near future to do some more analysis and talk about what I got out of this text. (which was a lot, so I hope it is even coherent!)

Magical Realism

I am going to have to put Dickens on hold for awhile as I start my final semester of college. I do intend to continue the blog and use it as a place to log thoughts about the books I am reading for my senior seminar, which is the only literature course I have this semester. The senior seminar is titled American Magical Realism and we are reading books by Updike, Tim O'Brien, Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison and W.P. Kinsella. We have already read the Witches of Eastwick by Updike and now will be moving on to Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien. Before I get into the novels though, I want to briefly talk about what Magical Realism is as a point of reference.

Magical Realism's roots begin in German and Eastern European literature in the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. It is characterized by the presence of something(s) amazing or magical in an otherwise ordinary situation and the fantastic element is usually treated as a matter of course by the characters and narrator. That is about as simple of a definition as I can give but since there is not a truly agreed upon definition, it does not encompass everything. It is important to note that if the Magical elements mount up to the point that the book clearly does not take place in this world or becomes fantasy (ie. Lord of the Rings) then it is not Magical Realism. From my own experiences, a good indicator is if an event takes place in an otherwise realistic novel that has you questioning whether or not that actually happened or was a figment of a characters imagination or symbolic language for another event, then it could be Magical Realism. The key is that in Magical Realism, the fantastic event actually took place and while it may be symbolic, it is a part of the reality of the novel. My popular culture analogy was the TV show, Family Guy, in particular Stewie's ability to talk. In the first few seasons everyone was confused as to whether or not the family could hear what he was saying or it was just an internal monologue that was made external for our benefit. Of course my professor did not exactly get or appreciate the reference, but I think it is a fairly decent example.

From its roots in Germany, Magical Realism was then claimed and developed as a distinctly Latin American literary form. Its development in Latin America added an element of faith to the Magical Real. In a culture that is more religious and more accepting of events the Western World labels impossible, Magical Realism was a perfect fit and became tied to an emerging cultural identity in Literature. It is no coincidence that the growth of Magical Realism took place during a time period in which Latin America was struggling to find their own identity and voice in the global community. We read several short stories in the beginning of the class to give us an ideal of what is and is not Magical realism. My favorite was the Handsomest Drowned Man in the World by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, it is short and worth a read if you are interested in an example. (Click on the title to get to the story online).

That cultural investment makes it a difficult form to break into if you are an outsider and yet there is enough American literature which can be classified as Magical Realism I am taking a class on it. From my brief introduction to Latin American Magical Realism in the short stories I mentioned earlier and North American Magical Realism in Updike, there is a marked difference in style. At least in Updike, the tone is much more cynical and irreverent than the more mystical and religious tone of the Latin American work. Of course, Updike is more irreverent and cynical than most, but I believe the lack of true mysticism in American culture makes it impossible to believably replicate the Latin American treatment of magical events. It will be interesting when we get to Erdrich and Morrison since the Native American and African American traditions feature mysticism much more prominently and are far more conducive to this sort of style.

I'll keep this post focused on Magical Realism in general and in the next post I'll give a brief synopsis of the Witches of Eastwick as well as some thoughts and reactions to the novel. It is going to be a great semester and the class has been really exciting so far. I would definitely recommend the novel if you enjoy Updike. If you are easily offended by salacious Literature, I would avoid it because sex is a central theme in the novel. If you can get beyond that though, it is worth it because there is an incredible amount of depth and very interesting thoughts and insights on a variety of subjects.