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REMEMBER WHEN NOVELS USED to run front to back, straight through, in order, from A to Zed?
When narrative was a seamless continuum of story that connected the dots and didn’t leave you dangling,
except at the ends of chapters? When only Burma-Shave signs had gaps in between? Man, are you old. My
advice? Get over it. Mr. Dickens has left the building.
Oh, you can still find novels that read like novels, very linear and all present
and accounted for. Lots of them, actually. It’s just that so many novels are told
upside down and backwards in a mirror that we almost don’t notice.
Ever picked up a “novel” only to find it’s a collection of short stories?
What’s up with that? Stories are stories and not chapters, right? We’re being
cheated somehow by a bunch of semirelated, autonomous, short narratives
getting hooked together by a “novelist” too lazy to do the job properly! That
about the size of it? I’ve heard this complaint many times in class, often in quite
heated tones. Here’s my advice: put a cool compress on your forehead and relax.
This trend has been going on for a while now and probably won’t be going
anywhere soon.
One of my favorite writers of these composite novels (I wish I could claim
the term, but it’s Joanne P. Creighton’s) is Louise Erdrich. Beginning with Love
Medicine, she has written a series of hilarious and heartbreaking novels of life in
and around a Chippewa reservation in the upper Midwest. Her own tribal
affiliation is with the Turtle Mountain Chippewa of northernmost North Dakota,
right up by the Canadian border. The novels’s various stories, and indeed the
publication order of the books themselves, often violate chronological order.
Love Medicine, for instance, should be the penultimate novel in the cycle, but it
was the first to appear. In it, the narrative begins with a story in the “now” of the
novel, the early 1980s, when the death of June Morrisey Kashpaw sets the plot in
motion, then jumps back to 1934, when the old people of the tale were young
and relationships were being forged. There are simi lar jumps in chronology,
point of view, and voice, with the principal storytellers being Nector and Marie
Kashpaw, Lulu Lamartine, and their great-nephew/grandson (it’s a maddeningly
tangled family tree), Lipsha Morrisey. But some stories are told in the third
person, and a few shift midway. Clearly, the traditional three unities of the
theater—time, place, and action—have taken a powder.
So why tell a story this way? Well, why not? I mean that literally. Why not?
There’s nothing magical or sacred about any organizing principle, and that most
certainly includes chronology. We may be accustomed to it more than to any
other method, but it’s only a convention, and those exist chiefly to be ignored.
The thing that should never be ignored is narrative logic, and that leads us to…
the Law of Narrative Unity: The best way to organize a novel is the way that
makes the most sense for that particular book. No universals here. The only
unity a novel has is whatever the writer imposes upon it and the reader discovers
in it.
So why is this form of unity right for Love Medicine? You’d have to ask
Erdrich, and I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t tell you. Writers are funny that way. I
can’t say for sure, but here’s what I think. First of all, it’s a group novel. That is,
the story and the outcome matter both singly (Lipsha, for instance, very much
wants answers to his questions) and collectively (these people are related by
blood, personal and group history, geography, and shared suffering). There is
also the matter of collective knowledge—and ignorance. In any real human
society, some people hold certain information, some hold other information, but
no one holds all of it. And all of them together? You’d think that you would
merely have knowledge by accretion, that collective knowledge would be the
sum of all individual knowledge, but while that may be true, there’s also
collective ignorance, that the sum of what individuals don’t know, or choose not
to reveal, adds into the group’s information database. And to a great extent this
novel, and each novel in the cycle, relies on what people do not know as much as
what they do. A third-person narrator, particularly one approaching omniscience,
would know and reveal far too much. The two people who in some ways matter
most, moreover, the deceased June and the notorious Indian activist Gerry
Nanapush, are never given their own chance to narrate their stories. Why?
Because what counts most in those stories is what other characters make of
them. To see the various uses to which those two life stories are put, we need to
hear from other characters but not from June and Gerry. This is a trick Erdrich
seems to have learned from Faulkner, who knew, for instance, that Caddy
Compson remains a much more vital and intriguing figure if she never explains
herself but is instead interpreted by brothers Benjy, Quentin, and Jason. Erdrich,
in fact, appears to have learned quite a lot from the great Mississippian, while
avoiding some of his more overwrought linguistic tics. Those are some reasons
we can extrapolate from observable effects in the novel, but there may be one
more. I once heard Seamus Heaney say that he didn’t have a long poem in him,
that he was not made for epic or extended narrative verse. This is not, I believe,
a fault; if one can write lyric poetry as he can, one needs no other arrows in the
quiver. It may be the same for Erdrich, that she is most attuned to short bursts of
narrative, most comfortable assembling those pieces into coherent, if
discontinuous, wholes.