Sie sind auf Seite 1von 25

Storytelling, Melancholia, and Narrative Structure in Louise Erdrich's "The Painted Drum"

Author(s): Jean Wyatt


Source: MELUS, Vol. 36, No. 1, ETHNIC STORYTELLING (SPRING 2011), pp. 13-36
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic
Literature of the United States (MELUS)
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23035241
Accessed: 05-11-2015 18:43 UTC

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/
info/about/policies/terms.jsp
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content
in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.
For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Oxford University Press and Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS)
are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to MELUS.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 161.112.232.221 on Thu, 05 Nov 2015 18:43:14 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

and Narrative
Storytelling, Melancholia,
Structure in Louise Erdrich's The Painted
Drum
Jean Wyatt
Occidental

College

To say that the story of Louise Erdrich's The Painted Drum (2005) is
subtly told would be an understatement; I argue that the transformation
of the protagonist, the process central to this novel, is not described at all.
Rather, the narrative structure, with its unexplained breaks and juxtaposi
tions, conveys the means of the protagonist's change. The novel sets the fol
lowing puzzle for readers: Part One is narrated by Faye Travers, a woman
whose

tenacious

attachment to her dead sister prevents her from engag


with
the
events of her own life; Part Four presents a transformed
ing fully
with
a
new
attitude that enables her to connect creatively with the
Faye,
outside world. Something has changed herand we have only Parts Two
and Three to look to for explanation. The stories in Part Two are told by
Bernard, a man on an Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota; his tales are
succeeded in Part Three by the story of a young girl named Shawnee and
her

siblings

on

the

same

reservation.

But

we

know

nothingor

almost

nothingabout Faye in these intervening sections. We know from the first


chapter of Part Two that Faye and her mother have come to the reservation
to return the Ojibwe ceremonial drum Faye discovered in a New England
attic; we know they form part of the group listening to Bernard's stories
listening, that is, to the stories we are reading. But Faye's consciousness
is not open to us during the storytelling, nor when the narrative returns
to her focalization in Part Four does she mention any response to the sto
ries. What we know from Part Four is only that Faye has changed: her
perception of reality has shifted toward an Ojibwe worldview, she has a
new vision of her relationship with the dead, and she is more open to the
unfolding experiences
state?

of her life. What brings Faye out of her melancholic

The cure is built directly into the narrative structure; the mechanism of
change is dramatized, not described. Because the plot of The Painted Drum
is undertold, because the process of Faye's transformation is not narrated,
the reader has to do work ordinarily accomplished
by plot; to understand
the change that takes place in Faye, a reader has to imagine the effect of
MEI.US,

Volume 36, Number 1 (Spring 2011)

This content downloaded from 161.112.232.221 on Thu, 05 Nov 2015 18:43:14 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

WYATT

Bernard's

storytelling on Faye through making his or her own associative


links between Bernard's stories and Faye's situation. The Painted Drum

puts the reader in the position of listener to oral storytelling, in the sense
that the text requires the reader to adopt a way of thinking akin to that of
a listener to traditional storytelling. Kimberly Roppolo says of American
Indian philosophy,

"We are taught by story, and we explain by story, not


Betty Booth Donohue notes that Native storytellers

by exposition" (268).
leave out explanation

and connective materials, expecting "the hearer to


do his or her own independent thinking" to fill the gaps. Just so, Bernard's
stories are laid out for us in Part Two of The Painted Drum, but the author

leaves it to us to discern how they affect Faye. As in the oral tradition, "the
hearer/listener must infer cause and effect" (Donohue
68).'
in a particular way
Moreover, the reader must make connections
through what Paula Gunn Allen calls an "accretive technique" (Sacred
95-96). In order to understand how Bernard's stories influence Faye, read
ers have to make associational

leaps across different story lines, as listen


ers to oral storytellers have to listen for analogies between disparate tales
in a story cycle. As we read, we begin to notice similar details occurring
in the widely different contexts of the stories, and we learn to connect
them. These parallels gradually build up a lived philosophy on death, loss,
mourning, survival, and the continuing relation of the bereaved to the
dead. Placed in Faye's position, as audience to Bernard's stories, we enact
the process

of listening that shifts Faye's view of life. While there is no


explicit explanation in Part Four for Faye's transformation, we understand
it, because we have experienced a readerly version of Faye's conversion
to a different way of knowing.2
In imagining a reader who has to learn a new way of thinking in order
to make sense of Erdrich's novel, I am positing a mainstream, non-Native,
Western-trained reader; a reader coming to the text from a tribal context
would

bring a different set of expectations and have a different relation


to the text (Wong 100-01). One's position in the social landscape cannot
features stand out and
help but influence what one sees in a novelwhat

what features recede into the background. In my reading of Part One, my


makes me particularly alert to repeated
familiarity with psychoanalysis
images of bodily enclosure and bodily containment that surface in Faye's
these images are for some time the only clues to the nature
consciousness;
of Faye's emotional paralysis, for Erdrich is nearly as reticent about the
nature of Faye's malady as she is later about the process of her healing. Not
until the end of Part One (some ninety pages into the text) do we discover
the traumatic
of physical

loss of her sister that has immobilized

incorporation

that precede

Faye. The images


and subtend this revelation betray

This content downloaded from 161.112.232.221 on Thu, 05 Nov 2015 18:43:14 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

NARRATIVE

STRUCTURE

strategy for preserving the dead sister. Arguably, psy


with
its
individualist perspective, is appropriate to Part One,
choanalysis,
where the first-person narrative perspective locks us into the closed and
Faye's

melancholic

inward-turning standpoint of Faye, an emphatically


individual.

solitary and alienated

As my analysis moves on to the storytelling structure of Parts Two


and Three, my interpretive frame widens along with the novel's shift to a
collective discourse; it expands to take into account the practices of tradi
tional storytellers that Erdrich's text imitates. On the map of contemporary
Native American literary studiesa map divided at the moment between
cosmopolitan, postmodern critics on one side and nationalist literary crit
ics on the other3my focus on the ways that readers process this storytell
ing structure locates my analysis with Western theorists of reader response.
However, the novel's native elements are inescapable.
My discussion of
how the text makes innovative use both of traditional storytelling forms
and of the traditions surrounding the Ojibwe ceremonial drum echoes in
some ways Nationalist American Indian critics' emphasis on the value
of literary works that adapt traditional practices and metaphysics to the
complexities of contemporary life. Respecting tradition, Erdrich personal
izes the drum; pushing tradition further, she makes the drum an actor that
interacts with and influences individual characters as well as the life of
the Ojibwe community. Furthermore, Erdrich adds a new dimension to
traditional accounts of storytelling by tracking the lasting transformative
effects of storytelling on the individual listener.
Faye Travers's

Melancholia

The traumatic event in Faye's life, the buried memory that surfaces
only at the end of her long opening narrative, is the death of her younger
sister, Netta, when Faye was nine (92-94). Faye is now in her fifties, and
only now can she put the event into words. Her mother was absent, leav
ing the two girls in the care of their father. Playing in the family orchard,
the girls had climbed high into an apple tree when their father came to tell
them to come in for the night. As they defied him by climbing higher, he
told them to jump down into his arms. Netta shook Faye's branch, and
Faye fell, hitting the ground as her father stepped aside. Netta looked at
her sister lying there, then stepped off the branch and fell to her death.
After the father rushed off with Netta's body in his arms, Faye realized that
the death would be blamed on her: "I knew how my mother and my father
would regard me from then on. ... I knew I'd lost them both, or all three
of them. I knew that now 1 was alone" (93). The trauma of the beloved sis

This content downloaded from 161.112.232.221 on Thu, 05 Nov 2015 18:43:14 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

WYATT

ter's death is compounded


by the betrayal of both parentsthe mother's
the
father's
destmctiveness, and the failure of both to protect
negligence,
their childrenso
that Faye feels she has lost all three: she is "alone."
Throughout Part One, the most salient feature of Faye's life is her
detachment from other people; some forty years after her sister's death,
she continues to be "alone."
She has no ties with the Ojibwe commu
nity that might alleviate her solitude, although her mother is half Ojibwe
and has inherited a plot on Ojibwe tribal lands. As the product of three
generations of New England upbringing and assimilation, Faye presents
herself as a rational, skeptical, thoroughly Westernized subjectthough
sometimes she enacts Ojibwe beliefs, as if cultural transmission occurred
at some subliminal level, despite her and her mother's negation of their
heritage.
Faye is devoted to her mother, with whom she lives, but theirs is an
alliance carefully designed to limit communication
to the surface of daily
life and prevent any in-depth exploration of each other's feelings and
memories. For example, they have never spoken of Netta's deaththough
Netta was daughter to one and sister to the other. Faye also keeps her rela
tionship with her lover, Kurt Krahe, within strict bounds: clandestinely
sexual at night, the relationship is strictly neighborly during the day. Faye
writesbut

only in the form of a journal written from herself to herself,


Faye is fiercely vigilant in guarding her solitude, maintain
a
barrier
between her internal world and the outside. Why? What
ing rigid
is she protecting?
self-enclosed.

Images in Faye's narrative suggest that running parallel to her daily


existence as an amused and detached observer of neighborhood events is a
subterranean life organized by a very different principle. These are images
of Faye's own bodyher bones, her heartalong with images of an inner
sanctum defended against incursions. These images suggest that Faye has
dedicated

an internal space to the preservation of her dead sister, that she


has developed a melancholic strategy to keep her sister with her and avoid
the finality of death.
In "Mourning and Melancholia,"
Sigmund Freud explains melancholia
as a desperate strategy to avoid the loss of a loved one: rather than giv
ing up the attachment to the dead through a painful process of mourning
libido from every image, every singular memory of the
detaching
melancholic identifies with the lost beloved, taking him or her
into the ego. Freud suggests that this process draws upon the earliest, oral
form of identification with the other. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok
beloveda

elaborate

on the oral and corporeal aspects of this process: melancholic


a fantasy of "swallowing
that which has been lost.

identification involves

This content downloaded from 161.112.232.221 on Thu, 05 Nov 2015 18:43:14 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

NARRATIVE

STRUCTURE

as if it were some

kind of thing"; the lost beloved is imagined as pre


served within, in a kind of bodily crypt formed from the subject's own
substance. The advantages to the bereaved person are, first, that he or she
avoids lossfor the dead is not lost, but preserved within; second, that he
or she avoids the painful psychic reorganization that acknowledging
the
loss of someone

profoundly connected to the self would trigger (Abraham


and Torok 126-27). Through fantasy, the melancholic maintains the status
quo.
Scattered

through Part One are images of just such a melancholic


of the dead. When Kurt Krahe's daughter Kendra dies,
encapsulation
Krahe begins to demand a closer intimacy; Faye can feel only that Krahe
"has become dangerously close" (79), and defensive images of a walled
off inner space proliferate. Thus when Faye first hears about Kendra's
death, her "heart creakfs] shut" (25). When Krahe mourns Kendra obses
sively, expressively, loudly, his articulate mourning threatens to make
Faye face up to the parallel loss of her sister: "The madness of sorrow
emanates from him. It enters and unfurls in me. It revives my own pain.
Unsolvable.

Alive" (65). Spatial images clarify the threat. Kurt's griev


into her inner spaceand
there it "unfurls."
ing "enters" Fayeintrudes
it
threatens
to
take
dedicated
to
the
Expanding,
up space
preservation of
the dead

sister. It is against

such incursions

that Faye's "heart creaked


internal space dedicated to

shut"the organ signifying here the closed


the preservation of the dead sister. In another image of bodily contain
ment, Faye thinks, "[M]y sorrow is deep in my bones and I'd have to break
the existence
every single one to let it out" (47). The image acknowledges

of something encased deep within the body, something protected by hard


walls created from Faye's own substance, figured here as her bones. Each
of these images bears witness to the literalizing nature of this particular
fantasy: the space provided for the dead beloved is a corporeal enclosure.
Indeed, when Faye finally brings the sister's existence into language (and
thus into full consciousness)
toward the end of her opening narrative, the
spatial imagery continues: "Over the years I've warped my life around
her memory, I think" (73). Rather than the self being central to Faye's life,
the sister is central; Faye has wound her being around the dead sister to
protect and preserve her.4
This desire to protect and preserve the dead extends to Faye's living
arrangements: she constructs external containersboth
temporal and spa
tialthat

redouble and thus fortify the walls of the internal crypt. With
her mother, Faye has created a temporal cocoon of daily routine, a "web"
of everyday acts"[o]ur
breakfasts and dinners. . . . [o]ur net of small
doings"which,
always the same, deny the passage of time and thus pre

This content downloaded from 161.112.232.221 on Thu, 05 Nov 2015 18:43:14 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

WYATT

serve the status quo, the suspended life of Faye and the dead sister. Faye
is adamant about "preserving what Elsie and I have made between us.
. . . Our web. Our routine" (79). The "web of our safe behavior" (263) is,
it is made up of time, of temporal acts daily
however, fragile. Because
enclosure
is vulnerable to the contingencies time
this
protective
repeated,
inevitably brings.
The spatial enclosure

that most obviously mirrors the internal sepulcher


and its suspended life is the family apple orchard, the site of Netta's death,
which Faye has kept dormant. Against Krahe's offer to prune the orchard
to life, Faye insists that the orchard must remain
"unkempt. . . unproductive . . . branches down, dying" (72). Mirroring the
forms an imaginary crypt for the
internal tomb, the orchard's deadwood
and "bring

it back"

spirit. When Krahe overrules Faye and chops out the deadwood,
Faye spends a long afternoon sitting in the orchard: "I want to remember
the orchard as cold, sleeping, wrecked, and still mine, before it happens"
(73). Faye's adjectives betray her fantasy: cold and sleeping are but figu
sister's

rative images for the dead; the orchard is not dead, but only suspended
in a seeming death. Only so long as the orchard retains this status is it
part of her self even though it is technically a part of nature, a
living-dead reflection of the psychic crypt that holds the living-dead figure
of the sister. In a melancholic energetics, the cost of keeping the other in

Faye'sa

a suspended state is the diminished life of the melancholic:


Faye has not
been investing energy in her own life, but has kept herself, like the dead,
in the following
in a holding space of suspension. As she acknowledges
was
arrested
at
the
moment
of
her
sister's
death: "I lost
her
own
life
pages,
myself along with her back there, I know it" (77).
The orchard, restored by Krahe's pruning, blooms in the spring, and
Faye mentions her sister for the first time: "I can see her, running in her
checkered shorts, with her flag of brown hair flying. She is climbing, quick
and nimble. 1 can just make out the dim shapes of the trees, their twisted
arms that hold her" (74). The sequence
follows the logic of the crypt:
Krahe has cut open the deadwood
tomb, so the dead girl's spirit bursts
out.

It is tempting to view the sister's exuberance"running,"


"climbing"
as a reflection of Faye's own liberation and revitalization; it seems that
sepulcher, the walls
along with the destruction of the external deadwood
of the internal crypt have given way. But this is only a temporary respite.
Faye soon replaces the orchard with a new external simulacrum of the psy
chic container: she locks the house and keeps it locked against her lover
and the outside world.

This content downloaded from 161.112.232.221 on Thu, 05 Nov 2015 18:43:14 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

NARRATIVE

STRUCTURE

A Collective

Therapy:

Bernard

Shaawano's

Storytelling

Part One ends with Faye describing Netta's death (92-94). The buried
traumatic memory makes its way into narrative, after some forty years of
silence and ninety-two pages of text. According to contemporary Western
trauma theory, putting a dissociated traumatic experience into the form of
a chronological narrative effects a cure by enabling the trauma survivor to
transform trauma into narrative memory and thus integrate it into personal
history.5 The end of Part One, then, seems to be moving toward a resolu
tion of Faye's melancholia.
Instead, the narrative breaks off abruptly and Chapter One of Part Two,
of a stranger, Bernard, an
"The Visitors," plunges us into the consciousness
on
a
reservation
in
North
Dakota.
Through his eyes, we see Faye
Ojibwe
and her mother as they come to the reservation to restore the ceremonial
drum Faye found in a New Hampshire house to its place of origin. From
this chapter, we know that Faye, her mother, and Bernard's Ojibwe neigh
bors form the circle of listeners for the stories Bernard tells in subsequent
chapters. Setting up the specific audience for Bernard's stories, this fram
ing chapter constructs the oral context of the stories that follow. Like a
traditional storyteller, Bernard tells stories told him by his elders in a voice
that is at once singular and collective.
Even the most flexible reader feels the shift from Faye's narrating voice
as a break, even perhaps as a loss. One might well object that a reader
familiar with some of Erdrich's earlier works would not be surprised that
the text presents a multiplicity of narrators. A novel such as Love Medicine
(1984), for example, sets up the principle of polyphony from the beginning
by moving from one narrative voice to another. The Painted Drum, on the
contrary, subscribes to the conventions of the traditional novel throughout
the extended length of Part One. The unbroken stretch of a long narra
tive given unity by a first-person narrator gives us no reason to doubt that
we are in the familiar territory of the psychological
novel: lulled by the
in
that
immersion
we
the narrative will
long
Faye's consciousness,
expect
continue to respect the conventions, continue to deliver a singular voice
order. We are after all reading a
narrating events in linear chronological
novel, a genre permeated from its beginnings by assumptions about the
central importance of the individual. It is partly because of our generic
expectations of a novel, partly because the break occurs so late in the text,
that we experience the abandonment of Faye's singular voice as a shock;
that shock has the potential to shake up a Western-trained reader's cultural
assumptions about the primacy of the autonomous individual. This formal
break with individualist

discourse

initiates a thematic move toward the

This content downloaded from 161.112.232.221 on Thu, 05 Nov 2015 18:43:14 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

WYATT

collective, including the collective wisdom on bereavement and mourning


that emerges from the sequence of Bernard's stories.
Bernard frames his stories with some thoughts on his audience. Like
the traditional storytellers described by Greg Sarris and Craig S. Womack,
Bernard is interested in how his stories affect his listeners' ways of think
ing. And, as in the case of these actual Native storytellers, Bernard's stories
have a pedagogical
aim.6 Such a didactic impulse is a natural extension of
culture, where storytelling, in addition to transmitting lessons in
to
all tribal members, has historically been the means of educating
living
the young: "The sole teaching aid of the Anishinaubaek
was the story"
Ojibwe

(Johnston, Manitous 171). Ostensibly, Bernard tells his stories to pass on


knowledge of the drumits origins, its historyto Faye and her mother.
But his desire to inform the women goes further: he knows about them in
for instance,
ways that the women do not know about themselvesknows,
how their bodies are shaped, that "they have long fingers" and "big narrow
feet with long second toes," because he knows the Pillager ancestors from
whom they descended. The two women "don't know who they are, what
it means that they are Pillagers," but Bernard does, so he will "tell them"
(107). Bernard's way of knowing differs from the epistemology of these
two assimilated,

Western-thinking women: his is a knowledge rooted in


Ojibwe history and tradition, in his own ancestral line and the Pillager line
from which Faye and her mother descend. The iteration of the word knows
twelve times on this final page of the framing chapter points to the possi
bility that Bernard's stories will cause a shift in Faye's epistemologyand
also, perhaps, in the reader's.
Like Bernard, Erdrich has designs on her audience, in particular on her
audience's
epistemology.
By imitating some of the techniques of oral sto
Erdrich
her
reader in the position of a traditional listener
rytelling,
places
pressed to think in ways appropriate to oral storytelling. First, Erdrich
resembles the "good storyteller" described by the Choctaw scholar Randy
Jacob: "In the oral tradition, good storytellers do not tell all of the story.
The hearer/reader must supply the missing parts of a narrative and com
prehend the point of the work by means of his or her own intellectual
efforts" (qtd. in Donohue 68). Erdrich gives us Bernard's stories, but she
does not tell us how they affect Faye. Since Faye's consciousness
is closed
to us throughout Parts Two and Three, we are left to determine the stories'
effects on Faye on our own. As in oral storytelling, our participation
required if meaning is to emerge.

is

In order to understand the process that changes Faye, the reader must
enter into a logic of cyclical time. According to indigenous understand
ings of time, events repeat in successive historical periods. Knowledge of

This content downloaded from 161.112.232.221 on Thu, 05 Nov 2015 18:43:14 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

NARRATIVE

STRUCTURE

how to live one's

life in the present is sought in the ancestors' encounters


Readers must draw analogies between the stories
of the ancestors that Bernard tells and the events of Faye's experience,
thereby engaging with a cyclical worldview wherein "the meanings of
events and conditions in the present moment lie piecemeal in the endless

with similar situations.

round of time" (Rainwater 416).7


A Western-trained reader accustomed

to a linear ordering of events


"through textual and temporal suc

who integrates events as they develop


cession" (P. Brooks 37) has to learn a new reading technique appropriate
to the dynamics of a Native story cycle. Namely, a reader has to be alert
to the repetition of small details that link stories that are otherwise dispa
rate and self-enclosed,
although interconnected by recurring characters.
We discern similar elements couched in difference and build up meaning
through the accretion of parallel details dispersed along various story lines.
To find meaning in the novel as a whole, we must extend this method
beyond the story cycle of Part Two and link up bits from the Ojibwe sto
ries with parts of Faye's story. Erdrich places us in a written version of oral
tradition, where it is not "the presence of an individualistic hero," but "the
presence of regularly occurring elements that are structured in definable,
regularly occurring ways" that is central to the fictional aesthetic (Allen,
Introduction 6) and where stories of the past give context and meaning to
experience in the present. Because the text withholds information about
Faye's reaction to the stories, it is up to us to make the connections.8
Bernard's first story, "The Shawl," tells of the death of a young girl,
named only "the daughter"as
if to signal the paradigmatic status of this
daughter who stands in for all the Native daughters lost to grieving parents
and siblings. Her mother, Anaquot, was seized by sexual passion for a
man not her husband. Flaving borne a baby by this man, she became lost
in yearning for him, useless to her husband and her other two children, a
five-year-old boy and a daughter of nine. Her husband finally gave up on
her, "turned his face to the wall," and sent her off to live with her lover
she took with her the baby sired by her lover and her nine-year-old
daughter, leaving her son behind with her husband. During the journey

(109);

across the frozen snow, wolves attacked the sledge and the mother threw
her daughter to them, saving herself and the new baby. The stories that fol
low trace the anguish over this loss that haunts the next two generations:
first the father who blamed himself for his passivity in not protecting his
daughter; then the brother who was broken at the age of five by the loss of
his sister and remained broken as an adult, so that he physically abused his
own son, Bernard. So far, the stories reflect Faye's experience: a mother
fails to protect a child because she is off seeking her own erotic adventure;

This content downloaded from 161.112.232.221 on Thu, 05 Nov 2015 18:43:14 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

WYATT

a beloved

child is lost; and the survivors cannot live full lives because they
are caught up in a never-ending cycle of grief and guilt. The key to Faye's
healing is that the stories also offer a different perspective on the dead.
In the story of Anaquot, the dead daughter warns her mother repeatedly
of the threats to her life and the life of the baby from the jealous wife of
her lover; her warnings save the lives of her mother and sister. In the fol
lowing story, the dead girl's father, Old Shaawano, "unable to unfreeze the
pictures in his brain" of his daughter's death and his own faint-heartedness
(154), remains riveted to his loss until the dead daughter returns to show
him her love and give him the task of making the ceremonial drum of the
novel's titlea task that prevents his suicide, "keep[ing] him here upon
the earth" (155). Later, the dead girl asks that her bones be put into the
drum to give its voice timbre. And later still, in the next round of time, in
the anonymous narrative that follows Bernard's stories (Part Three), the
drum sounds (by itself) to awaken another nine-year-old girl, Shawnee,
from death, enabling her in her turn to bring her two siblings out of the
death-grip of hypothermia. In a redoubling of the original story, the daugh
ter's spirit, now inhabiting the drum, once again protects life.
As in Faye's life, the dead girl haunts, but there is a difference. In each
story the desire of the dead sister is not to infect the remaining sibling
with her own deadnessas
in Faye's casebut to preserve and enhance
the lives of the living. Far from labeling a continuing commerce with the
dead a pathology, as Western theories of melancholia
do, Ojibwe culture
that
and
dead
not
lose contact with
acknowledges
"living
persons [do]
each other" (Vecsey 67). However, the stories suggest more positive,
with the dead than melancholic
less crippling models of communication
encryptment. The change in Faye in Part Four stems from listening to
various versions of her own story of loss, thereby acquiring new mental
schemas

for understanding her relation with the dead.


In Part Four, when the narrative returns to Faye's focalization,

she envi

sions her own dead sister differently. At the end of the novel, she leaves
the child cemetery where Netta is buried:
the way

[0]n

a cliff.

There

back

to my

must

be

playing

there.

I watch

stream.

Over

and

twist

themselves

of rock.
have

Say

lived

And

isn't

have

a space

rising

and

themselves
into

soar

off, sink,

eaten

and

are

in the raven's
the girls

a form

made

in the

pines

falling

because

air
then

and
shoot

of the

sacrificed

of the consciousness

gives

the

down.
over

up again
and

aren't

share

on
are

They
the

they
above

lip
that

creatures

themselves,
we

out

ravens

into the invisible

fly upside

insects

graveyardthen
who

that

off a branch

the

and

the children,

their delight

I pass
bank

tumble

they

upright

they

car,
air

as they throw

over,

off the dead

of the people,

an

the spirits

buried
and

here?
below

This content downloaded from 161.112.232.221 on Thu, 05 Nov 2015 18:43:14 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

NARRATIVE

the ground
me,

and

zipping

my hair.
and

STRUCTURE

watch

in between,

straight

I call

where

at my face,

out my sister's

the raven

. . . until

I stand,

name
she

right here?

but I do not flinch


in the wildness
plummets

down

One

raven

as its wings

veers
brush

toward
through

of the moment.

Then

the cliff again,

laughs,

I turn
and

disappears. (276)
This vision concludes
release

the novel. The spatial imagery announces Faye's


from the stasis and constriction of melancholia.
In place of the

closed-up psychic crypt holding its suspended dead, Faye envi


sions an open space where her dead sister, transformed into a raven, moves
and plays freely.

closed-in.

Faye's vision reveals the effects of Bernard's storytelling in at least


two ways. The Ojibwe stories of the dead daughter's interventions and
desires give Faye a new model of what her own dead sister may want:
not to turn her living sister into a static memorial to the dead, but to make
the lives of her living relatives better. This new mode of memorializing
frees Faye to imagine a different way of remaining connected to her dead.
More generally, this closing vision is permeated with Ojibwe assumptions
about the nature of the universe that Faye, once so set against a conversion
to Native beliefs (43), has evidently absorbed from Bernard's storytell
ing. She locates herself in an Ojibwe vertical cosmos, with a world above
and a world below the world in which she stands. Netta's metamorphosis
into a raven reflects the Ojibwe belief in the interconnection of all living
things, and, more specifically, the Ojibwe belief in the ability of the human
traveling

soul

to transform

into

bird,

plant,

and

animal

forms

(Vecsey

60;

Barnouw

247-48). Echoing a premise of Bernard's stories, Faye envisions


a continuum between the living and the dead. The dead, here in the shape
of the raven, shares with the living a joy in being in movement, rather than
infecting Faye's living subjectivity with her own stasis.
Just as in oral storytelling a philosophy of life is completely subsumed
into the stories (Krupat, qtd. in Cheyfitz 66; Roppolo 268) without com
mentary or explication, so in The Painted Drum the means of Faye's
renewal is never overtly stated; it is, rather, performed by the sequence
of stories in Part Two. Making connections between elements that repeat
across difference, linking self-involved fathers, mothers driven by erotic
desire to neglect or abandon their children, and heroic sisters who save
their siblings, we process the means of Faye's conversion to a new way
of thinking. We learn what changes Faye through an active listening and
participation analogous to hers. The text itself performs the healing cer
emony.9

In retrospect, it becomes clear that the dislocating abandonment


of
narrative
voice
is
a
formal
move
toward
first,
Faye's
only
dismantling

This content downloaded from 161.112.232.221 on Thu, 05 Nov 2015 18:43:14 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

WYATT

reader reliance

on the individual. The second narrative move, the collec


of Part Two, challenges Western individualist assumptions
about the nature of mourningassumptions
reflected in Freud's account

tive discourse

of melancholia

and mourning as processes confined to the inner world of


individual. In contrast, Native storytelling offers a collective
mode of mourning, as in Lisa Brooks's account of her family's gathering
to mourn her cousin's death: "We told stories that would make meaning
the bereaved

from my cousin's death. ... A huge gap in the web of our family required
the mending that only stories can do; those strands reinforce the relations
between us, remind us of our shared history, let loose the laughter that
gives us the reassurance that we can, as a family, endure" (231). Here, sto
rytelling enacts a mourning that is also a healing from loss. In The Painted
Drum, the stories of Faye's ancestors told by Bernard similarly weave her
back into the Ojibwe family web. When the narrative returns to Faye's
perspective in Part Four, Faye follows Bernard's model, using storytelling
to mend and deepen relationships

in her own immediate

family.

The Drum
The structure of the ceremonial drum that Faye uncovers in the Tatro
attic turns out to be isomorphic with the shape of Faye's melancholia.
The drum is a hollow enclosure, created from Old Shaawano's
grieving
for his lost daughter, and it literally houses the lost object: the bereaved
the daughter's bones in the drum. However, unlike the
psychic receptacle that encloses Faye's dead sister, the drum has posi
tive effects on the people who surround it. In the past it has provided a
Shaawano

placed

centripetal force for the Ojibwe community, bringing the people together
(180). At the beginning of the novel, Faye is not the only one experiencing
unbearable loss: the Ojibwe community suffers also from the loss of their
drum. Likewise, the return of the drum revitalizes the community as well
as Faye: the healing is reciprocal.
Erdrich speaks of such Native losses and of the obligation they impose
on Native authors: "In the light of enormous loss, they must tell stories of
contemporary survivors while protecting and celebrating the cores of cul
tures left in the wake of the catastrophe" of white invasion and coloniza
tion ("Where" 48). One category of Native Americans' "enormous losses"
is the loss of their sacred objects to a Euro-American
market economy
that desecrates them by transforming them into commodities for sale. The
drum's extraction from its Native

context is not an isolated case:

Bernard

remembers a number of objects endowed with love and/or faith"some


beautiful and sacred, like the drum" (106)that
became articles of trade.
the
return
of
the
drum
to
its
communal
context, Erdrich
By depicting
living

This content downloaded from 161.112.232.221 on Thu, 05 Nov 2015 18:43:14 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

NARRATIVE

STRUCTURE

traditional objects and ceremonies as the "cores of culture" that


renew Ojibwe tribal life.
Erdrich's portrait of the drum makes a gift to the Ojibwe community
outside the novel as well. The Painted Drum contributes to the imaginative
celebrates

dimension

of Ojibwe tribal sovereignty by, as American Indian Nationalist


critics
advocate, "returning] to Native ceremonies and traditions"
literary
But
such a return, as Nationalist critics also caution, can
(Warrior 88).
best demonstrate the usefulness

of tradition by adapting traditional means


to the challenges of the present (Warrior 94; Womack 42). Rather than
merely repeat the traditional attributes of the drum, Erdrich innovates on
tradition, providing new meanings that are "continuous with, but not cir
cumscribed

by, Native traditions" (Warrior 117).


The novel picks up the Ojibwe belief that the drum is "a living being .. .
an important personage commanding respect" (Vennum 61).10 But the text
goes further: it depicts the drum as an actor in the present situation, a being
with agency and purpose that effects change in the world. As in Ojibwe
culture, healing powers are attributed to the drum: in the past, "this drum
was so kind that it cured people of every variety of ill" (Erdrich, Painted
179). But Erdrich avoids depicting a traditional drum ceremony of healing
(her reticence motivated, as she implies in an Author's
by respect for the sanctity of Ojibwe drum ceremonies
Erdrich gives the drum personal power, so to speak:
people change those people's lives.

Note to the text,

Rather,
[277])."
its interactions with

The drum is depicted


it "sounds"

as an agent from the moment of its introduction


when Faye first passes it in the Tatro attic (39);
when she touches it, the contact "pull[s] through [her] ... a clear convic
in Part One:

tion" that she must, against professional ethics and all her former life of
probity, steal it and take it home (40). The drum plucks Faye out of the
world of commerce

wherein American

Indian ceremonial objects function


her
mother
are estate agents whose "specialty
as commodities (Faye and
[is] Native American antiquities" [29]) and moves her into an Ojibwe dis
course within which sacred objects replenish the lives of the Ojibweas

the drum replenishes Faye's spirit. (Once she has the drum, Faye learns to
care for it according to Ojibwe tradition; and the need to return the drum
to Ojibwe territory connects her with her Ojibwe heritage.) In Part Three
the drum again sounds by itself to effect another rescue, resuscitating
Shawnee and her siblings from hypothermia and guiding them to safety.
Upon its return, the drum renews Ojibwe community: "it gathers people in
and holds them. It looks after them" (180).
Traditionally, the Ojibwe dance drum has great spiritual power, includ
ing medicine power, because its maker receives the design for the drum

This content downloaded from 161.112.232.221 on Thu, 05 Nov 2015 18:43:14 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

WYATT

from a Manitou

in a dream. The drum is "the materialization of a [dream]


in an artifact" (Vennum 148); it thus carries powers transmitted
directly from the spirit world. The Painted Drum modifies tradition some

vision

what: it is not a Manitou

who gives Old Shaawano


the design, but rather
to
her
father
in a dream and
daughter
appears
grieving
directs him to make the drum: nonetheless, the inspiration for the drum
the dead

who

from the spirit world.


To view the narrative structure of The Painted Drum from a perspective
that foregrounds Ojibwe tradition, one would not start at the beginning,
comes

with Faye's

opening narrative, but rather at the novel's center, with the


origin story of the drum. If we begin with the story of the drum's creation
on pages 148 through 179 and move outward, it becomes obvious that the

drum plays a central role in every ancestral story told by Bernard (with
the exception of the first story of the daughter's death, which provides the
incentive for making the drum). Beyond the perimeters of Bernard's story
cycle, the sections that flank Part Two on either side are symmetrical in
presenting the drum as an agent of change in the present: in significant but
very different ways it awakens first Faye and later Shawnee to new life.
Now, viewed from a standpoint that focuses on the renewal of Ojibwe
tradition, the story cycle that constitutes The Painted Drum takes on the
configuration of concentric circles around the sacred center of the drum's
making. The formal markers of the author's organizing vision reinforce
this circular

structure: the opening and closing sections, Parts One and


the
same title"Revival
Road"and
the novel ends at the
Four, carry
same geographical point where it began, with Faye leaving the children's
graveyard. From this perspective, the narrative structure can be seen as a
ceremonial
in Blaeser

form of what Gordon Henry terms "sacred concentricity" (qtd.


57) with the creation story of the drum at its centera circular

form that recreates in a verbal medium the round shape of the drum as well
as the circular pattern of drum dances.12
Storytelling

as Relationship:

Faye's

Renewal

in Part Four

Returning to the linear progress of a reader through the novel, we must


still ask, as we reach the fourth and final part of the novel, What heals
Faye? In Part Four, as Faye becomes the narrator once again, we can see
that she has emerged from melancholia,
but there is no explanation of
her cure. During Parts Two and Three, while readers are denied access to
Faye's consciousness,
something must have intervened to transform her
state of mind.
Signs of Faye's

recovery

abound.

She expresses

a marked change

This content downloaded from 161.112.232.221 on Thu, 05 Nov 2015 18:43:14 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

in

NARRATIVE

STRUCTURE

her orientation toward space and time. Her new attitude toward temporal
ity is condensed in the changed symbolic significance of the apple orchard.
While Faye was a captive of melancholia, the orchardmoribund,
ghostly,
and unchangingfunctioned
as a memorial to the past, to the moment of
the sister's death. Now, Faye decides to eat an apple, deriving pleasure in
the present (272); and she vows to "taste as many [apples] as [she] can"
(274) in the future, relishing the experiences to come. Faye's acceptance
and enjoyment of the changed, living orchard signals her release from
bondage to the past and her consequent openness to life's unfolding.
Faye's new construction of space shows the influence of the Ojibwe
stories on her perspective. The ecstatic vision of the raven/sister playing
in the air beyond the graveyard establishes a new space beyond death, a
fluid realm where humans can transform into birds and animals and the
dead remain in touch with the living, as in the Ojibwe universe. Before
this final moment of vision, Faye populates her New England landscape
with animal figures that recall Ojibwe worldviews.13 In addition to her
renewed

feelings of kinship with the ravens, she attends closely to the


whose
coyotes,
barking reminds her "of all the broken and hunted crea
tures who survive and persist and will not be eliminated" (258). Crows
and ravens are trickster figures in several Native cultures (Cheyfitz 63-65),
and Coyote is a prominent trickster figure in Ojibwe stories. A chance
meeting with a bear confirms Faye's healing through a system of referents
to Ojibwe culture. Bear is one of the Ojibwe clans: indeed, the Pillagers
from whom Faye is descended belong to the Bear clan, as Erdrich's earlier
novel Tracks (1988) clearly indicates by assigning Bear clan markers to
the Pillagers' graves (Tracks 5). In the first instance, the meeting with the
bear represents a confirmation of Faye's own clan identity: the bear's calm
to know who I am"completes
the cycle
recognition of Faye"seeming
with
Bernard's
to
to
"who
begun
promise
convey
Faye
[she] is, what it
means that [she is] Pillager" (107).14 The bear vanishes magically, suggest
ing that it may be a spirit bear like the bear that in Tracks gives strength
to Fleur (also a Pillager) in childbirth. In Ojibwe culture, the bear's sea
sonal cycle of hibernation and revival represents the cycle of illness and
renewal (Scarberry-Garcia,
"Beneath" 46). A bear is considered to have
notes: "Bear is the liv
great medicine power, as Susan Scarberry-Garcia
embodiment
of
the
ing
continuously generating healing powers of nature"
(.Landmarks 40). Hence, the encounter with the bear also signals Faye's
healing. Indeed, taken together, Bear's traditional meanings suggest that
Faye's

revival stems from her rebirth as a member of the Bear clan.

By contrast with the characters in the classic Native novels surveyed


by William Bevis, Faye's recovery is tied not so much to a "homing in"

This content downloaded from 161.112.232.221 on Thu, 05 Nov 2015 18:43:14 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

WYATT

to tribal landsalthough
she does plan to return to the reservation to par
in
the
ceremonies
of the drumas to a homing out, a relocation
ticipate
and reconstruction of the Ojibwe landscape and its animals in the place of
model of cultural mobility seems adaptive to a time of Native

exile. Faye's
diaspora.

Faye's integration of Ojibwe world views into the basic coordinates of


her existence shows the profound influence of Bernard's Ojibwe stories. It
is not merely the content of Bernard's stories that has changed Faye: the
form of storytelling itself provides her with a framework for interpersonal
relationship that she, averse as she is to most forms of intimacy, can tol
erate. In Part Four Faye brings storytelling into the relationship with her
mother. Fler use of storytelling to reset family relations is perhaps mod
eled on Bernard's retelling of a family story to his father.
In the midst of relating the ancestors' stories, Bernard tells how he cre
ated an alternative version of the daughter's story for his father, who even
as an adult remained

by the picture of his mother throwing his

obsessed

sister to the wolves:


Have

ever

you
were

wolves

considered,

and

tenderhearted

only

asked

that she

brave,
hungry,

she

him,

saw

how

given

at the whole

looked
their

need

was

your

sister

was

so

She

saw

the

situation?

only

need.

She

knew

you

were back there, alone in the snow. She saw the baby she loved would not live
a mother.

without

. . . She

offer themself,

or they

think

who

you

the good

being

saw

all would
she

was,

that one

clearly
die.

And

of the old

first, she jumped,

of the people

person

in that moment
sort
my

on

the wagon

of Anishinaabeg
father,

had

of knowledge,

n'deydey,

who

to

don't
thinks

brother

of

to that

little girl, don't you think she lifted her shawl and flew? (116-17).
of realitya story of loving self-sacrifice,
the horrific story frozen in the father's
strength, even beautychallenges
mind, providing him with a new perspective on the traumatic past. Bernard

The son's

alternative

version

reframes the story to produce healing.15


Faye seems to be following Bernard's example of family telling and
retelling when, after forty years of sharing only silence with her mother
regarding Netta's death, she asks, very simply, for her mother's story:
"Where

were

you

that day?"

...

"What day?" . ..
"The

day

she

stepped

out of the tree."

"Jumped?"
"No,
fall.
was

she

Maybe
gone.

stepped

off a high

she thought
You

were

I was

branch.
dead.

off somewhere.

let me drop.

Daddy
I don't

know.

Where?"

She

just

She

saw

stepped

him

let me

off. The

. . .

This content downloaded from 161.112.232.221 on Thu, 05 Nov 2015 18:43:14 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

car

NARRATIVE

"I was

STRUCTURE

with

"You

had

She

nods

someone."

an affair?"

. . .

and

says

and

at a loss

quietly,

"I

was

not home

very

much

at all.

Don't

you

shy, "Did

you

remember?"
I'm

quiet

for a moment,

then

I ask,

suddenly

love him?"
"Of
"But

course.

. . . Inordinately,

that is the way

people

should

foolishly,"
be loved"

she

whispers,

then

looks

up at me.

(263-64).

Faye understands very well that her probing threatens to destroy the
cocoon of daily routine she and her mother have spun around the unspeak
able, around the dead: "I have always been afraid of talking to my mother
on this level, of breaking through the comforting web of our safe behavior.
We have knitted it daily and well." "[W]e must go deeper now, and per
haps apart. We must see what each of us is made of, what differing stories"
To listen to the other's story is to recognize the other's difference.
Faye invites difference, even separation, by asking her mother to tell her
story: she abandons the safety of sameness and accepts that the mother's

(263).

"differing stories" will challenge her own.


Faye could maintain the stasis of her melancholy
sister and to the unchanging moment of lossshe

adherence

to the dead

could keep her own


out
the
other's
differing
story and its chal
intactonly
by
walling
story
truth.
and
her
mother
each registers
to
her
own
Now,
Faye
psychic
lenge
at
other's
account
of
Netta's
death
the
(264). "Surprise" signals
"surprise"

picture of the past. Reciprocally, the story


of each partner causes the entrenched story of the other to shift, and a new
relational context between mother and daughter emerges: "She isn't for
a sudden shift in each woman's

giving me any more. No, it is I who am forgiving her" (264). Exchanging


stories is equivalent to opening one's inner world to the challenge of the
other's different psychic reality, which by turns parallels and diverges
from, confirms and opposes, one's own inner narrative.
When Faye calls for her mother's differing story the word story points
back to Bernard's storytelling as the source of her new relational para
digm; and the word differing indicates the core dynamic of storytelling in
this novel. In Faye's dialogue with her mother as in her experience of the
Ojibwe ancestors' perspectives on death and loss, storytelling and story
listening create a dialectical relationship
taneously reflects one's own experience

in which the other's story simul


and offers new perspectives on

it, shaking up and turning around one's fixed ideas. Again, Erdrich draws
on Ojibwe tradition but gives it her own twist. In the traditional wisdom
by Paula Gunn Allen and Leslie Marmon Silko, tribal storytelling
comforts and heals through similarity, as a listener is assured that "no

voiced

This content downloaded from 161.112.232.221 on Thu, 05 Nov 2015 18:43:14 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

WYATT

one's experience is idiosyncratic" (Allen, "Sacred"


17) and that "if others
have done it before . . . [and] have endured, so can we" (Silko 52). In The
Painted Drum, it is the difference of others' stories that heals.

Notes

I am

to the following

grateful

to strengthen
my

Susan

argument:

Forrest

Flavens,

readers

but also

the writing,

Todd

Layton,

who

not only

their own

Cristina

Bernardin,

Lynne

of this essay,

contributed

Escobar,

ideas

ways

and

enrich

Doreen

Forter,

Greg
Frances

McGowan,

suggested

to extend

Fowler,

and

Restuccia,

Victor

Wolfenstein.

1. In this essay

I use

in Susan

torynotably,

of names

imposition
Bernardin

"Native

"Native,"

of these

Each

changeably.

terms
Bernardin's

by the

for a discussion

"issues

words,

culture

Indian"

of identity

issues

of resistance

of the
and

advantages

"American

with

freighted

dominant

of the

and

American,"

comes

United

his

to the colonial

States"

drawbacks

inter
and

(156).

See

of the various

des

ignations.
2. At

the

time

lished

on

The

have

novels

as

storytelling
health"

D.

writes

the figure

in order

to capture

"the

by both

modernist

literary

oral

traditions

and

associational

(such
the

narrations

by

Nanapush

to his

"Ojibwa

story

a communal

into Love

and

recursive

a storyteller's
(87).

storyteller

use

James

Nanapush

granddaughter

Lulu

elements"

in Erdrich's

cycle

an

as
(1-3).

two

which

("Mediation"

notes
oral

restores

Hertha

231).

structure

that are

narrative

informed
and

voices)

recurrent
that

storytell

narrative

of stories

multiple

of repetition,
Flavin

Love
"uses

of "a traditional

nature

instance,

in her

Erdrich

Louise

Medicine's

pub
Drum

of Burning

ceremony

Medicine

for Love

(for

strategies

structure)"

as healing:

been

Painted

techniques

of Tales

characteristics

of a web

cyclical

as

...

lists several

The

storytelling

In her reading

has

Stokes,
in

storytelling

of storytelling

of salvation

Karah

by

on

of traditional

use

incorporates

uses

Wong

essay,

essays

discussed.

Ruppert

art" that Erdrich


Sweet

Erdrich's

a means
James

(127).

No

widely

Rosenberg

one

only

Drum.

been

has

Roberta

(1996),

writing,

however,

appeared;

earlier

er's

of this
Painted

development,

Tracks

constructs

the

addressed

communication

Elizabeth

Gargano

novels

for children,

by
the

emphasizes

The Birchbark

House (1999) and The Game of Silence (2005) (28).


3. A debate between nationalist critics and cosmopolitan critics currently enliv
ens the field of Native American literary studies. Cosmopolitan critics Arnold
Krupat
in

Elvira

and

interpreting

tural

dialogue.

what

Ruppert

the

essays

on

Pulitano

Native
They
calls

find poststructuralist

American
explore

the

works

and
argue

convergence

a "mediational

postmodern

and

approaches

discourse"
to Native

theories

postcolonial
for hybridity

of Native
("Mediation"
literature

and

and

useful

cross-cul

Western

voices

229-30).

See

collected

by

in
also

Gerald

This content downloaded from 161.112.232.221 on Thu, 05 Nov 2015 18:43:14 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

NARRATIVE

Vizenor.
work

STRUCTURE

American

lectual

Indian

and

traditions

Indian

intellectual

tribal

sovereignty.

critic

and

cultural

This

sovereignty.
work

Heath

for an

and

on

is a tribal-specific

ethic,

kinship

to American

aimed

at building

criticism

"Tribal-specific

with a political,

community

intel

indigenous

that contributes

notes:

frame

interpretational

carrying

framework

Justice

to a living

call

contexts

epistemologiesa

Daniel

his/her

critics

Nationalist

in indigenous

grounded

the

links

cultural

and

historical specificity" (211). From a nationalist perspective that asserts "the right
of Native

retical

(Womack

frames

in Fire

nationalist

119,

4. The
box

one

with

labeled

Mother's

Faye

and

Funeral,"

5. Trauma

today,

essay

and

contributors'

cure

in that volume

for traumatic

ory and

symptoms

subside

(Van

important

Sarris

for a Western

Kolk

how

McKay's
Womack

(37-39).

extend

recounts

Alexander's

performance

of the

is "part

story

aspects

building
constitutes
narrative:

7. Catherine
ciples

form

(99).

Womack,

or ceremonial

on

Creek

time:

Love

dialogue
responses

story,

an interdependency"
essay

to the listening,

her stories

insisting
Nationalist

for example,
nationalism

the cultural
as well
and

Sarris

Thus,

Sarris

his

critics
writes:

describes
mind

elder

own
stress

"Their

is created

as to

Womack

listener's

to the Creek
that

more

even

therapeutics.

frames

in the

mem

presentation

stories

Both

has

re-enactments,

Drum's

McKay

the

as

or narrative
and

is led to examine

(19-24).

internal

his own

also"

survival.

brings

van

narrative

communal

as part of the telling.


an

Turtle

story

of storytelling.

Rainwater's

of cyclical

at length

of the

an art of Creek
the two

into

of the

Mabel

worldview

narrative

to others'

that the listener

of the listeners

stories

Painted

collec

Onno

for Caruth's

linear

into normal

an alternative,

he or she

of a Pomo

and

model

as flashbacks

listening

is domi

edited

Kolk

sequential

The

176).

storyteller

a way

epistemology

the differences

Hart

of tears"

grief.

narratives,

der

care

lifetime

organized

into

each

. . . My

Caruth's

van

be integrated

provides

Pomo

in such

audience
and

own

on trauma

A.

such

see

Funeral

frozen

Faye's

the neurobiological

that makes

process

telling

Bessel

memory,
der

is a wooden

a woman's

chronologically

can

Van

one's

the responses

include

and

describes

preconceptions
encounter

trauma

goes,

healing

than

6. Greg

how

memory.

in estates

in Cathy

translation

of involuntary

der

of a collective

on

Once

the

Robert
itself,

"Teddy's

that holds
criticism

provides

emphasis

the theory

occurred,

tears:

introduced

in Memory.

For

Roppolo,

of handkerchiefs,

containing

literary

criticism.

of the debate

her dealings

L.M.B.'s

"box

and

Womack's

et al.

layers

container

framework

Explorations

der Hart's
other

This

including

theoretical

Trauma:

tion,

so on.

S.

Craig

Kimberly

accounts

Weaver
from

theo

act of colonization
on

of nationalist

For

and

that caused

to the psychic

theory

by the

nated

Womack.

of

exercise

important

or Euro-American

essay

Justice,

it contains

the event

is homologous

model

for herself

keeps

recent

Blaeser,

to the dead

"an

to be a new

appear

209-215;

as

of European

excellent

and

1; Justice

artifact

can

Kimberly

Weaver,

note

belonging

fully

(35)

Jace

Warrior,

Gamber

an

see

literature"

Camber's

John

provides

argument,

own

literature
55).

(Blaeser

Drowning

their

the imposition

29),

on Native

appropriation

Allen

to interpret

people

sovereignty"

Linda

experience
the

nation

storytelling
Creek

through

(62).
Medicine

"Ceremonial

eloquently
time

is cyclic

describes
rather

the prin
than

This content downloaded from 161.112.232.221 on Thu, 05 Nov 2015 18:43:14 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

linear,

WYATT

accretive

than

rather

. . . the text implies

incremental

that cyclic

. . . best

patterns

disclose the meanings of individual lives" (416).


8. While

no articles

several

critics

on readers.

of Ojibwe

oral

strategy

integrate

the components

tains"

Kathleen

(84).

the

into

story

of Western

process

through

more

tions

Native

E.

selves

reader
are

[that]

as mutable

the
leads

this

however,

both

Native

narrative

and

toward

while

it posi

("Celebrating"

meaning"

Medicine

teaches

of the self to include

woven

dis
non

techniques

reader"

of Love

reading

inextricably

dis

narrativity,"

knowledge"

on

integrate

Medicine's

that frustration

(406);

and

his or her model

and

finally

non-Native

perspectives

participatory

to expand

and

Medicine's

of meaning

Western
that

argues

a (Euro-American)
and

value

Love

of the implied

of narrative

changes

into

to

it con

patterns

"frustrate

insight"

Her

Medicine.
by working

that Love

marginality

that

appreciation

"to

Reid

Shelley

claims

perspective

American

continual

of a novel;

sense

"epistemological

Ruppert

readers

makes

Love

the cyclic

character

of a text-induced

epistemological

Native

81).

the reader

produces

(422).

and

of Love
the rich

incorporates

knowledge

says

yet appeared,

narratives

turn, ponder,

Rainwater

plot

have

into

that

that the

position,

(35).

of time,

experience

codes

shift "the
"a

codes

ultimately

shift

seek

to recognize

remarks

"to

whole"

which

to the reader's

Native

Sands

a coherent

ruption

location

M.

and

"Erdrich

methods

teaching

her readers

of the text

Drum

that the multiple


notes:

Schultz

and

that

the reader

force

perspective

A.

Lydia

demands

Painted

on the effects

traditions

narrative

to The

response

commented

have

Medicine
legacy

on reader

have

"lives

as their

together

stories"

(76).
9. The

same

has

Mitchell

237;
and

hence

been

said

of Leslie

Owens

27;

95).

Marmon

The

the performative

engages

Silko's

text of The
dimension

Drum

leaves
more

of reading

(Lincoln

(1977)

Ceremony

Painted

more

than

unsaid

Ceremony

does.
10.

Thomas

Vennum

close

with

collaboration
was

years
Tara

Vennum's

Browner

entity";

Native

attests

and

rumbles

Over

and

corrects

times

conveys

an

Ojibwe

the

proper

and

feasts

drum's

mythical

its ceremonial

drum

maker

their

for it, and

uses.

who

construction

"consider

Ojibwe

in drum

. . . there's

1 ask

Vennum's

to tribe,

of the ceremonial

participate

through

when

refer to the drum

they
and

who

down

over

details

ceremonial

Ojibwe

of such
drum

In

for fifteen
a drum.

to be a living

dedicate

themselves

to

Browner's 2002 study of Native American music and

a pow-wow

approaching

he

to the power

Americans

Baker,

for it, give

respect

"taking care of it" (135).


ceremony

tribe

that present-day

show

the

of

from

William

mentor,

writes

they

details

gives

its migrations

(44-45),

origins

and

dancers

that the Ojibwe

and

their

out into the sky

drum

of all

pow-wow

elegiac)

and

humanity.

experiences

Browner's

(87).
even

"When

powwows;

It echoes

the heartbeat

about

of its sound"
(sometimes

for contemporary

voice

itself.

representing

and

the power

ethnographic

the impression

the drumbeat

the earth,
singers

drum's

ceremonies

study

tone,

its ceremonies

updates

which

some

are vanish

ing traditions.
11. For
Melvin

a first-hand
Eagle's

oral

account
history

of the Ojibwe
of the Mille

drum
Lacs

ceremony's
drum

ceremony

power

of healing,

that cured

see

his crip

This content downloaded from 161.112.232.221 on Thu, 05 Nov 2015 18:43:14 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

NARRATIVE

STRUCTURE

pling back ailment (103-05).


12.

The

circling
within

motion

patterns
the circling

lecture

Henry's

Native

American

Dawn)

"create

a sacred

(qtd.
that

toward

in turn

of time

and

follows

58).

the sacred

from

See

also

Pueblo

which
Louis

the

people

Sacred

150).

and

Owens's

description

wherein

"all

construct

House

of power

ripples

in

that

Made

and

of

connec

of Ceremony

orientation

evoked

live
Gordon

on to explain

goes

Medicine,

emanate

worldview

an imaginative

center,

"how

(Allen,

Love

(Ceremony,

center

the

reflect

space"

of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

novels

in Blaeser

tion"

dances

spirals

at the University

classic

work

of the

as a

is centripetal,

in the inward-spiraling

form of a ceremonial sand painting" (96). Vine Deloria, Jr., identifies a similar
in Native

pattern

American

not the directional

circle,

"Its

poetry:

relate

sequences
of the

determination

to the

integrity

It encompasses,

line.

of the

it does

not

point" (ix).
13.

The

idea

England
to me
14.

that

by Susan

Karah

recreates

Faye

with

countryside

an

various

Ojibwe

animals

landscape

by

of Ojibwe

was

New

the

populating

significance

suggested

Bernardin.

Stokes

discusses

issues

of Ojibwe

in The

identity

Painted

Drum,

argu

ing that it is behavior, not blood, that determines tribal identity.


15. Cristina Escobar suggested this line of thinking.

Works Cited

Abraham,

Maria

and

Nicolas,

versus

Torok.

The Shell

Incorporation."

or Melancholia:

"Mourning
and

the Kernel:

Introjection

Renewals

of

Psychoanalysis. Trans. Nicholas T. Rand. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994.


125-38.
Paula

Allen,

Introduction.

Gunn.

Tales

and

New

York:

Fawcett,

"The

Sacred

Hoop:

Indian

Writing

Contemporary

Woman's

Spider

1989.

by Native

Women.

Ed.

Allen.

1-26.

A Contemporary

Literature:

Traditional

Granddaughters:

American

Critical

Essays

Studies

Perspective."
and

Course

in American
Ed.

Designs.

Allen.

New

York:

MLA, 1983. 3-22.


.

The

Sacred

Hoop:

1986.

Boston:

Barnouw,

Victor.

the Feminine

Recovering

in American

Indian

Traditions.

1992.

Beacon,
Wisconsin

Chippewa

Myths

and

Tales

and

Their

Relation

to

Chippewa Life. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1977.


Bernardin,
American

Susan.
Indian

"The

Authenticity

Literature."

True

Game:
West:

'Getting

Real'

Authenticity

in Contemporary
and

the American

West.

Ed. William R. Handley and Nathaniel Lewis. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P,


2004. 155-75.

This content downloaded from 161.112.232.221 on Thu, 05 Nov 2015 18:43:14 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

WYATT

William.

Bevis,

"Native

on Native

Essays

American

American

Novels:

In."

Homing

Literature.

Ed.

Brian

the Word:

Recovering
and

Swann

Arnold

Krupat.

Berkeley: U of California P, 1987. 580-620.


Blaeser,

"Native

Kimberly.

Words

of Our

People:

Penticon:

Armstrong.
Lisa.

Brooks,

Literature:
First

"At

Nationalism.

Ed.

Jace

at the

Looking

Ed.

Jeannette

C.

52-62.

Place."

Weaver,

Center."

of Literature.

'Analysis

1993.

Theytus,

the Gathering

a Critical

Seeking

Nations

Afterword.

American

S. Womack,

Craig

and

Indian

Robert

Literary

Warrior.

Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2006. 225-52.


Peter.

Brooks,

Reading

the Plot:

for

and

Design

Intention

in Narrative.

Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.


Tara.

Browner,

Heartbeat

of the People:

Music

and

Dance

of the Northern

Pow

Wow. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2002.


Caruth,

ed.

Cathy,

Trauma:

American

Indian

to American

Literatures

Indian

in Memory.

Explorations

UP, 1995.
Cheyfitz, Eric. "The (Post)Colonial

Baltimore:

Johns

Hopkins

Construction of Indian Country: U. S.

and

Literatures

Federal

Indian

of the United

Law."

States

The

Columbia
1945.

since

Guide

Ed.

Cheyfitz.

New York: Columbia UP, 2006. 3-124.


Jr. Foreword.

Vine,

Deloria,
Native
New

American
York:

New
Ed.

Poetry.

and

1985.

International,

Old

Robert

Voices

K.

'kon-tah:

ofWah
and

Dodge

Joseph

Contemporary

B. McCullough.

ix-x.

Donohue, Betty Booth. "Observations of Another Trotline Runner: A Critical


Discussion of D. L. Birchfield's Oklahoma Basic Intelligence Test.''''Studies
in American

Indian

Melvin.

Eagle,

Language:

Literature

66-79.

11.3(1999):

"Dewe

'igan

Meshkawiziid:

Ojibwe

Tales

and

Oral

The

Power

Histories.

Ed.

of the Drum."
Anton

Treuer.

Living
Saint

Our

Paul:

Minnesota Historical Society, 2001. 101-07.


Louise.

Erdrich,
.

Tracks.

"Where

The

New

Painted

York:

I Ought

Drum.

Harper,

to Be:

New

York:

2005.

Harper,

1988.

A Writer's

Sense

of Place."

Wong,

Louise

Erdrich

43-50.
James.

Flavin,

"The

TracksStudies

Novel

as

in American

Performance:
Indian

Communication
Literatures

3.4

in Louise

Erdrich's

1-12.

(1991):

Freud, Sigmund. "Mourning and Melancholia." 1917 (1915). The Standard


Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 14

Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1957. 243-58.

(1914-1916).
John.

Camber,
and

"Born

Continuance

of the Creek

Landscape:

Womack's

Reconstructing

Drowning

in Fire."

Community

MELUS

34.2

103-23.

(2009):
Gargano,

Out

in Craig

Elizabeth.

"Oral

Narrative

and

Ojibwa

Story

Cycles

in Louise

Erdrich's The Birch bark House and The Game of SilenceChildren


Literature

Association

Quarterly

31

(2006):

27-39.

Johnston, Basil. The Manitous: The Spiritual World of the Ojibway. 1995. St.
Paul: Minnesota Historical Society P, 2001.

This content downloaded from 161.112.232.221 on Thu, 05 Nov 2015 18:43:14 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

NARRATIVE

STRUCTURE

. Ojibway

1976.

Heritage.

Daniel

Justice,

Heath.

Lincoln:

Our

Fire

P, 1990.
A Cherokee

the Storm:

Literary

Krupat, Arnold. "Nationalism, Indigenism, Cosmopolitanism:


on Native

Perspectives

History.

P, 2006.

U of Minnesota

Minneapolis:

U of Nebraska

Survives

American

Literatures."

Critical

Centennial

Review

42.3

(1998): 617-26.
.

Turn

The

to the Native:

in Criticism

Studies

and

Culture.

Lincoln:

U of

Nebraska P, 1996.
Kenneth.

Lincoln,

American

Native

Renaissance.

U of California

Berkeley:

P.

1983.
Carol.

Mitchell,

as Ritual."

"Ceremony

American

Indian

5.1(1979):

Quarterly

27-35.
Louis.

Owens,

'"The
Leslie

Identity."

Very

Essence

Marmon

of Our

Silko

Leslie

Lives':

s Ceremony;

Silko's

A Casebook.

Webs

of

Allan

Ed.

Chavkin.

Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. 91-116.


Elvira.

Pulitano,

Toward

a Native

American

Critical

U of

Lincoln:

Theory.

Nebraska P, 2003.
Catherine.

Rainwater,
Louise
Reid,

E. Shelley.

between

"Reading

Erdrich."
"The

Worlds:

Literature

American

62.3

We Tell:

Stories

of

405-22.

(1990):

Louise

in the Fiction

Narrativity

Erdrich's

Narratives."

Identity

MELUS 25.3-4 (2000): 65-86.


Roppolo,

"Towards

Kimberly.

Using

a Tribal-Centered
Instead

Rhetoric(s)

Indigenous

of Native

Reading

of Literary

Literature:

Paradoxa

Analysis."

6.15

(2001): 263-74.
Roberta.

Rosenberg,
in Louise

James.

Ruppert,

"Ceremonial
Tales

Erdrich's

Culture:

"Celebrating

and

Healing

the Multiple

Love."

of Burning

Love

MELUS

Medicine.'"

Narrative

27.3

Tradition
113-3

(2002):
Louise

Wong,

1.

Erdrich's

67-84.
.

"Mediation

and

Narrative

Multiple

in Love

Medicine."

North

Dakota

Quarterly 59.4 (1991): 229-42.


Sands,

Kathleen

M.

Medicine:

"Love

Voices

and

Margins."

Wong,

Louise

Erdrich's 35-42.
Sarris,

Greg.

Keeping

Slug

Woman

Alive:

A Holistic

Approach

to American

Indian Texts. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.


Scarberry-Garcia, Susan. "Beneath Creaking Oaks: Spirits and Animals in
Tracks."

Approaches

to Teaching

the Works

of Louise

Erdrich.

Ed.

Greg

Sarris, Connie A. Jacobs, and James R. Giles. New York: MLA, 2004. 42-50.
.

Landmarks

of Healing:

A Study

o/'House

Made

of Dawn.

U of

Albuquerque:

New Mexico P, 1990.


Schultz, Lydia A. "Fragments and Ojibwe Stories: Narrative Strategies in Louise
Erdrich's Love Medicine." College Literature 18.3 (1991): 80-95.
Silko,

Leslie

Marmon.

Yellow

Woman

and

a Beauty

of the Spirit:

Essays

on

Native American Life Today. New York: Simon, 1996.

This content downloaded from 161.112.232.221 on Thu, 05 Nov 2015 18:43:14 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

WYATT

Karah.

Stokes,

'"Who

Erdrich's

Louise

what

are,

they
The

it means':

Drum."

Painted

Native

Kentucky

American

in

Identity
21

Review

Philological

(2006): 53-57.
Van

der Kolk,

Bessel

A.,

and

of Memory

Flexibility

Onno

and

van

der

Hart.

the Engraving

"The

Intrusive

of Trauma."

Past:

Trauma:

The

Explorations

in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. 158-82.
Vecsey,

Traditional

Christopher.

Ojibwa

Religion

Its Historical

and

Changes.

1983. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1993.


Thomas.

Vennum,

Washington,
Vizenor,

ed.

Gerald,

American

Dance

Ojibwa

Smithsonian
Narrative

Indian

Robert

Warrior,

The
D.C.:

Institute,

Chance:

Literatures.

Allen.

Drum:

Tribal

and

Construction.

Discourse

on Native

1982.

Postmodern

Norman:
Secrets:

Its History

U of Oklahoma

Recovering

P, 1993.

American

Indian

Intellectual

Traditions. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1995.


Jace.

Weaver,
Native

Jace,

Weaver,

That

American

Womack,

S. Red

Craig

Oxford:

S. Womack,

and

on Red:

Oxford

Robert

U of New

Albuquerque:

Native

Live:

Might

Community.

Craig

Nationalism.

the People

Native

American
UP,

Warrior.

Mexico

American

and

Literatures

1997.
American

Indian

Literary

P. 2006.
Literary

Separatism.

Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999.


Wong,

Hertha

D.

Sweet,

ed.

Louise

Erdrich

s Love

Medicine:

A Casebook.

Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.


. "Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine: Narrative Communities and the Short
Story Cycle." Wong, Louise Erdrich's 85-106.

This content downloaded from 161.112.232.221 on Thu, 05 Nov 2015 18:43:14 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Das könnte Ihnen auch gefallen