Louise Erdrich    Love Medicine (1984/1993)

Study Guide

AUTHOR BACKGROUND
ERDRICH:  much acclaim, stories often anthologized 
Good at representing contemporary reservation life

Father - German; Mother Ojibwa (both worked for BIA school in Wahpeton, ND - hometown)

BA - Darthmouth, MA Johns Hopkins

Maternal Grandfather = Pat Gourneau, tribal chairman of Turtle Mountain Chippewa for years

Edited The Circle, Boston Indian Council

Married Michael Dorris - also Native American writer, professor of Native American studies at Dartmouth (both taught there for years). Had 5 children together (two adopted).

Began writing full time in early 90's. Left Dorris and moved to Minneapolis around 1994.

Dorris killed self in 1997 (perhaps The Antelope WifeB1998 has some autobiographical elements?)

Planned series of four novels—actually five center around fictional North Dakota community

Love Medicine incorporates water as major symbol      (1934-1983 1^st publ, humor, love)

The Beet Queen incorporates air as major symbol         (1931-1972 off rez / obsessive love)

Tracks incorporates earth as major symbol                   (1912-1919 - allotment struggles)

The Bingo Palace          ?

Tales of Burning Love incorporates fire as a major symbol

Erdrich & Dorris say their writing is collaborative: AWe=re collaborators, but we=re also individual writers. . .@ p. 85 B Brown Ruoff / Bruchac

Love Medicine

From A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff American Indian Literatures, MLA,1990 (pp. 84-87):

Series of interconnected stories humorously portrays several generations of families of hapless Nector Kashpaw and 2 women he loves: his wife, Marie Lazarre Kashpaw & mistress, Lulu Nanapush Lamartine.

Nector, son of Margaret Kashpaw, center of love triangle

Marie is illegitimate child of Pauline who takes name of Sister Leopolda after becoming a nun.  Marie and Pauline/Leopolda locked in intense conflict (Marie doesn=t know it=s her mother; Leopolda probably does know). Marie helps Nector rise to tribal chairman, but he lusts after

Lulu, who revitalizes reservation population by bearing numerous children by her husband, his brother, and variety of other lovers (she is at center of family tree). She is fecund & passionate.

Jealous Marie inadvertently is responsible for her husband=s death when he chokes on a turkey heart she encouraged him to eat because she thinks its love medicine.

Mutual grief brings Marie and Lulu together

From Kathleen M. Sands (ALove Medicine: Voices and Margins@ in Louise Erdrich=s Love Medicine: A Casebook, ed Wong, 2000, Oxford U Press)

Novel of hard edges, multiple voices, disjointed episodes, erratic tone shifts, bleak landscapes, eccentric characters, unresolved antagonisms, incomplete memories: collage (splices random margins of experience into patchwork structure).

Novel focused on spare essentials, those events and moments of understanding that change the course of life forever. 

Metafiction: ironically self-conscious in its mode of telling, concerned as much with exploring the process of storytelling as with story itself.  Marginal, edged, episodic and juxtaposed. Not the characters and events who are peripheral but the reader who is placed at a distance B observer on fringes, forced to shift position, turn, ponder, and finally integrate into coherent whole by recognizing indestructible connections between the characters and events of the narrative(s).

Compellingly tribal in character

Storytelling process (also of Momaday, Silko and others): both major characters and reader share responsibility for making story come out right, reenactment of sacred myth, tradition of telling tales on winter nights.

For Erdrich: secular anecdotal narrative process of community gossip, the storytelling sanction toward proper behavior that works so effectively in Indian communities to identify membership in the group and ensure survival of the group=s values and its valued individuals.

EXAMPLES OF GOSSIP as topic:
See p. 233, Lulu AI was always a hot topic@
p. 199, Lipsha, AAfter a while I started to remember things I=d heard gossiped over@ (while looking for love med ingredients)
p. 268, Lipsha AWe talked a good long time about the reservation then. I caught him up on all the little blacklistings and scandals that had happened. He wanted to know everything.@

Gossip affirms identity, provides information, binds the absent to the family & community

Leads from episodic nature of traditional tales (elliptical b/c audience already familiar w/ characters, cultural context, values). Audience involved in fleshing out details/connections (no strangers).  No Aright@ story, tone, interpretation.

Novelist is investigator who gets Awhole story@ from many sources & sees it as whole through artistic distance B> irony that voices in novel achieve

No single version / tone / narrative style / predictable pattern of development / single narrator

Dialogue terse and sharp, tense like relationships. Narrators jar reader=s expectations, voice lives

NOVEL OF VOICES