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

Style, Spring, 1999 by Rita Ferrari

Linda Hutcheon's work insists on the political relevance of the postmodern and conceives of the art of "Blacks and feminists, ethnics and gays, native and 'Third World' cultures" as integral to the postmodernist and poststructuralist critique of hierarchical dualisms. These groups

do not form monolithic movements, but constitute a multiplicity of responses to a commonly perceived situation of marginality and ex-centricity. And there have been liberating effects of moving from the language of alienation (otherness) to that of decentering (difference), because the center used to function as the pivot between binary opposites which always privileged one half: white/black, male/female, self/other, intellect/body, west/east, objectivity/subjectivity. (Poetics 62)

The breakdown of binary oppositions is a form of border dissolution. Erdrich's work engages this postmodernist practice along with the more subtle play of borders in the critique of representation suggested by Ann Smock's description of Blanchot, in her introduction to The Writing of Disaster, as attributing "the 'crypticness' of language - its way of concealing and conserving meaning - to the crypts within it, the recesses where inside is out and thus cannot be brought out (where the secret, all exposed, cannot be discovered)" (vii-viii). This essay examines the problem of representation in Erdrich's novels as illuminated through actual and metaphorical borders. Divided into sections, the essay focuses on the relation between inside and outside. These sections mark its various inflections in the relation of self to other and of these to language: the erotic border - body and word; the borders of vision; re-viewing the borders of the self; the borders of representation.

The erotic border - body and word

Love Medicine's emphasis on discovering kinship ties and on erotic relationships reflects the entangled complexity of Erdrich's world and relates a need to get beyond stifling containment. The novel begins with June Kashpaw's death in a snowstorm as she tries to return to the reservation that was once her home. She forgoes the bus as she spends the last hours of her life drinking with a white "mud engineer" (3) from whom she vaguely hopes for something good, something "different" (4). In a moment alone, in the restroom of a bar, she suddenly feels release from her feeling of fragility, of being on the brink of falling apart: "All of a sudden she seemed to drift out of her clothes and skin with no help from anyone" (4). The novel closes with an analogous sense of release. Lipsha has gotten "down to the bottom of [his] heritage" (342) and learned that June was his mother and Gerry Nanapush is his father: "In that night I felt expansion, as if the world was branching out in shoots and growing faster than the eye could see" (366). With this sense of expansion, founded on his realization of identity, he crosses the border into Canada with his father, who is wanted by the white authorities, and then re-crosses the border to the reservation to bring himself (and, symbolically, his mother) home. The novel suggests that the reservation is no longer a place to which Lipsha is consigned simply by circumstance and imperial power; it is, instead, redefined by his vision of himself in relation to his culture.