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

Style, Spring, 1999 by Rita Ferrari

Re-viewing the borders of the self

Nanapush's vision and direction of Eli's tracking serves nurturance and unity (since Eli's gift of meat will help Fleur to forgive him for his fling with Sophie), whereas Pauline's act serves division and presages her definitive rejection of her Indianness. The first vision Pauline narrates casts a clearer - and darker - illumination on this rejection. Her dreams have been troubled ever since the time she did nothing to stop a group of men in the white town of Argus from raping Fleur. The next day Pauline locked these same men in the freezer as they hid from a tornado and they froze to death. Finally she escapes her tormented dreams and gains peace of mind by watching the death of Mary Pepewas, an Indian girl about her age with whom she went to school. Pauline develops an extended metaphor of cutting the rope that ties Mary to life. When Mary drifts off to death Pauline feels incredible lightness: "A cool blackness lifted me, out the room and through the door" (68). Her "wings rake the air" and she rises, gazing down at the life below her:

They were stupid and small, milling behind the lanterned windows [. . .]. I alone, watching, filled with breath, knew death as a form of grace [. . .]. I knew that after I circled, studied, saw all. I touched down on my favorite branch and tucked my head beneath the shelter of my wing. Then I slept, black and dreamless, beautifully complete [...]. (6869)

Pauline crosses a border, away from the guilt she suffered because of her allegiance to Fleur and into a sense of righteous wholeness. The dead Indian girl represents a stand-in for herself, and, further, suggests the abject that Julia Kristeva describes in Powers of Horror. According to Kristeva, the abject induces

one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects. (1)

Pauline must reject the abject represented by the dead Indian girl to attain an acceptable sense of self.

Kristeva describes the corpse as "the utmost of abjection": "[R]efuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border" (PH 3). Pauline finds peace and importance in helping her guardian, Bernadette, with the body fluids and defilement that precede death and in witnessing the moment when the living become dead. Indeed, she has a "vision" of multitudes of Chippewa walking the death road toward Christ, to whom she says, "I've brought You so many souls!" and who tells her "Fetch more" (140). This vision reflects more precisely the cultural component of what Pauline desires to reject, or in Kristeva's usage, to abject. Kristeva says that abjection may be called "a border; abjection is above all ambiguity" (PH 9). It is experienced as being both inside and outside the self(12); it is "what disturbs identity, system, order" (PH 4). Pauline figures the Indian as defiled; she feels herself to be Indian and not Indian. That is, she wishes to be wholly white and, on a cerebral level, separates herself from all that is Indian. But her vocabulary and worldview are imbued with the Indian, and all the people significant in her life are Indian.