"Where the Maps Stopped": The Aesthetics of Borders in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine and Tracks

Style, Spring, 1999 by Rita Ferrari

Johnson and Michaelsen define borders as "always already crossed and double-crossed, without the possibility of the 'trans'cultural"; they suggest "comprehending the cultural or linguistic self as necessarily incomplete, coming to be, held open to 'outside' cultures, while, at the same time, as having always already enfolded the other within itself, with the border between the inside and outside, in principle, unclosable" (15).

This essay seeks to engage the ways in which Erdrich's novels elaborate (often elusive) borders as sites of constant interplay. The essay's focus is on the aesthetic, on Erdrich's use of language, image, structure, and character. In her writing the aesthetic engagement of subjectivity delineates a mode of being-in-the-world and a critique of representation - both integral to a conception of the self in relation to culture (or an acknowledgement of the self as always and already inscribed by culture).

In Love Medicine and Tracks, Erdrich employs a narrative technique that dissolves the boundaries between the seen and unseen, fact and fiction, memory and event. Through this dissolution of boundaries Erdrich's texts inscribe both the radical fictionalizing and situatedness in the world that Patricia Waugh sees as the Nietzschian and Heideggerian strains in postmodernist thought and fiction. The most obvious element of Erdrich's narrative technique is the use of multiple narrators (two in Tracks, eight in Love Medicine) who frequently recount the same story from very differing perspectives, and thus produce differing renderings of events and interpretations of significance. The two narrators in Tracks and the many speakers/writers in Love Medicine exist in relation to each other, perpetually modifying and destabilizing the narratives with which they are juxtaposed. In this way, Erdrich achieves full rather than totalizing texts. Linda Hutcheon defines totalizing as "the process [. . .] by which writers of history, fiction, or even theory render their materials coherent, continuous, unified - but always with an eye to the control and mastery of those materials, even at the risk of doing violence to them" (Politics 62). Erdrich does not install a new monolithic viewpoint, moving the margins to the center; instead she causes the margins to proliferate. Writing about characters who are displaced by definition, Erdrich uses aesthetic displacement to critique any master narrative or totalizing viewpoint.(2)

The multiple perspectives, along with Erdrich's pairing of narrators with different moments in time, creates gaps in the stories. While these gaps are sometimes "filled" by other characters and are sometimes "filled" by the reader's interpretation, they still assert a textual silence or hole. Alice Jardine describes the poststructuralist idea of the "hole in the text" as the "'unrepresentable factor' [that] can perhaps be formulated, but not represented, for it is the space of nonresemblance between the signifier and the signified" (124-25). This linguistic subtlety has an obvious correlative in how Tracks and Love Medicine focus on Native Americans who historically have been unrepresented or represented in manipulative ways in the service of a dominant group's ideology. That focus clearly calls attention to the nonresemblance between signifier and signified and of both to the referent. The possibilities of representation play themselves out in the functions of language and in accordance with how the speaker and the reader situate themselves inside or outside Native American culture?