Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Winter 2001
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 21, No. 1, Winter 2001, pp. 71-72.
Abstract
Both of these recent publications support Professor A. LaVonne Brown Ruoffs observation that Louise Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Chippewa) is the author most studied in recent literary criticism of American Indian literatures (Chavkin 182). While Erdrich may be the object of much study and discussion, the accuracy and usefulness vary widely.
The stronger of the two books, Peter Beidler and Gay Barton's A Reader's Guide to the Novels of Louise Erdrich, carefully presents time lines, genealogies, geographic identifications, and character definitions. As a study guide, the approach thoroughly clarifies, delineates, and cross-references the complicated relationships among Erdrich's characters, places, and times. This meticulousness, however, is also the book's weakness; the authors have imposed a linear and categorical template on Erdrich's nonlinear tales and tribal and communal relationships. By fixing interpretations, kinships, and places, this encyclopedic critical approach loses the essence of Erdrich's narrative enchantments and suggestive ambiguities.
The collection of essays, The Chippewa Landscape of Louise Erdrich, edited by Allan Chavkin, is disappointing. Although published in 1999, the essayists seem caught off guard by the 1996 publication of Erdrich's novel, Tales of Burning Love. Several of the essays erroneously refer to The Bingo Palace (1994) as her most recent novel and then tack on undeveloped references to Tales of Burning Love. Most glaringly, Catherine Rainwater's essay on ethnic semiotics wrongly concludes Lipsha freezes to death in the end of The Bingo Palace when Tales of Burning Love affirms his survival.
Other essays have inexplicable omissions: William J. Scheick's analysis of "A Wedge of Shade" does not consider how Erdrich reworks the short story for a chapter bearing the same title in Tales of Burning Love. Robert F. Gish similarly fails to regard Erdrich's poem "Jacklight" in his discussion of hunting as metaphor in Love Medicine, even though Annette Van Dyke explains the Jacklight/ hunting sexual metaphor in her essay on "Female Power in the Novels of Louise Erdrich." Van Dyke suggestively refers to a Chippewa feminine vision quest, but does not support the idea or consider earlier studies by Patricia Albers and Bea Medicine on female power in gender complementary relationships. Likewise, Nancy J. Peterson's essay on "Indi'n Humor and Trickster Justice in The Bingo Palace" provides an inadequate cultural context for the Chippewa trickster or trickster in general, although the discussion does offer details of American Indian gaming legal decisions. And while Chavkin evaluates the political implications of the revised and expanded text of Love Medicine, he does not place the modifications within the tribal context of oral tradition of telling and retelling narratives.
Comments
Copyright 2001 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln