Week 11 Flashcards
(4 cards)
Discontinuous Narrative
Frequently used to describe features of “high” Modernist Fiction:
e.g. John G. Parks, “Human Destiny and Contemporary Narrative
Form” (1984):
“The loss of boundaries, experimentation and exploration, and Protean identities characterize much of the serious fiction since the Second World War. Not only has the thematic content of fiction reflected cultural breakdowns – in its treatment of madness, disintegration, alienation, loneliness, absurdity – but also the way fictions are told. The abandonment of plot and character in favor of episode and voice, and an often fragmented and discontinuous narrative, reflect a radical questioning of, if not outright disbelief in, a notion of human destiny and a sense of relatedness to an overarching theological and cultural narrative paradigm. In short, for many writers, there is no longer available a central story which explains and gives human value to experience.”
More relevant to Louise Erdrich’s narrative forms is Frank Moorhouse’s “discontinuous narrative”: Brian Kiernan, “Frank Moorhouse: A Retrospective” (1981):
“The effect is that while the stories move through discrete social levels, generations, and locales, they also imply an elusive pattern of interaction, one in which connections are not made as they would be in a traditional novel. … [Moorhouse’s] discontinuous forms are essential to his view of the way things happen and of the discreteness and fragmentation of individual experience. What happens does not ‘develop’ as in a continuous narrative, yet there is the sense that all is not random, disconnected, arbitrary. … discontinuity would seem to presuppose some continuity to depart from …” (emphases added).
How is the short story transformed when it is integrated into a longer discontinuous narrative?
Louise Erdrich, “Satan: Hijacker of a Planet”
→ first published in The Atlantic (August 1997)
→ reappeared as the first chapter of the 3rd section of the “novel” The Plague of Doves (2008).
Nine of the 21 chapters of Erdrich’s “novel” were originally published as short stories.
Who is “Satan” in the story?
Is it Stan? Or the unnamed narrator?
Is the “Satan” of the story also the “Satan” of the novel?
Who “hijacks” or holds the “planet” to “ransom”?
In each text, what is the relevance to this question of:
– the reliability of the narrator?
– the narrative structure and symbolic language?
The story is radicalized
Marn becomes the focal point of a settler-colonial history of violent land theft and the destruction of indigenous belief systems: she, through all that she represents, is “Satan, Hijacker of a Planet.”
The story is “indigenized” by putting into play Settler and Native histories of the town of Pluto, to “imply an elusive pattern of interaction, … [so that w]hat happens does not 'develop' as in a continuous narrative, yet there is the sense that all is not random, disconnected, arbitrary” (Kiernan).
UNRELIABLE NARRATION
What kind of narrative is this?
– Bildungsroman: a narrative of personal formation: recounts a specific event and period of time that was life-changing for the narrator, told retrospectively from an indeterminate future time and place.
– Narrator’s rhetoric echoes the promise/prophesy topos in Stan’s sermon
– Narrator’s use of rhetorical paralipsis or preterition: to draw attention to something by claiming to omit it; in theology, to be passed over or omitted from God’s elect; in Roman law, the omission of an heir form a will that is then invalidated.
How is the narrative constructed through the
sequence of action?
– The story respects classical unities of time and action.
– Ambiguous narrative crisis or turning point in the action:
“This is when it happens” (p.7)
– Alternative “crisis” (p.4): changes in narrative discourse as Stan’s sermon is presented.
Does the resolution of the action, following the narrative crisis, relate to Stan or the narrator? If the turning point concerns the protagonist (named in the title) which of them is “Satan”?
To whom does the story belong? Whose story is told?
– Overt, intrusive, homodiegetic, first-person narrator
– every utterance is an implicit act of self-characterization
→ raises the issue of reliability
– unreliability of reported actions Vs narratorial commentary
→ raises the issue of sub-text or covert meaning
– suggestions that the narrator is not honest
about her motives (e.g. for staying to talk with Stan to make up for her mother’s rudeness); or
about her narration (e.g. says she will avoid the images of abuse in Stan’s “picture” but describes them anyway)
– unnarrated gaps or ellipses: e.g. she suddenly refers to “the man” by his full name (p.2) with no account of how that knowledge was acquired.
Narrative perspective / focalization
Text is highly focalized through the first-person narrator:
Characterization through objects:
Stan / his car
mother / the objects she buys
father / the land and “how much abuse it will sustain”
grandfather / trees
Ed’s mother / dying baby bird
Herself / land as her emotional landscape
Ambiguous shifts into free direct discourse (p.4):
– speech is quoted but with no quotation marks or identifying tags rendering the speaker and truth-status of the speech ambiguous;
– ambiguous shifts of focalization from narrator to Stan, from summary to direct report of the sermon to narratorial commentary to direct tagged speech by Stan (p.5).
Who “owns” the sermon? Who controls the discourse?
Emphasis on “eyes”
– contrast Stan’s eyes with her grandfather’s eyes (p.2);
– sermon: stress on eyes of God; imperative to look in “The Book” (p.4);
– Stan’s eyes are “the blue of winter ice” (p.5);
– praying over Ed’s mother: stress on eyes (p.6);
Emphasis on seeing
– seeing as knowledge, emotion, “character” (p.3);
– the pictures in narrator’s head contrast sight with sound and smell (p.7);
– Stan’s demand for a gesture of belief from the congregation = close eyes and surrender credit cards (p.5)
Note that the narrator wears glasses, corrective lenses, in a narrative that stresses the importance of seeing clearly.
Who is “Satan” in the story?
Is it Stan? Or the unnamed narrator?
Who “hijacks” or holds the “planet” to “ransom”?
(recall the financial wordplay in the narrative: “credit”, “save”)
What is the relevance to this question of:
– the reliability of the narrator?
– the narrative structure and symbolic language?
Satan: Human adversary or enemy; Angelic being hostile to humanity; tempter; Supreme evil spirit; Accuser, slanderer; “The great deceiver”; Rebel archangel, motivated by pride.
Lucifer:
The name of Satan before his Fall;
Light-bringer; the morning star (Venus);
“one who presumptuously rebels against an earthly sovereign” (obsolete).
Symbolized as a serpent or dragon
– taking control by force of a vehicle in transit, to change direction to another destination;
– to steal or seize (contraband) goods (in transit);
– piracy, extortion or swindling (e.g. credit card hijacking);
– in communications to take over a communicative relation or association;
– to change the agency or intention of something.
– rocky or gaseous bodies orbiting around the sun and visible by its reflected light,
– a source of reflected light or power or influence,
– a “wandering star,”
– a controlling or fateful power, usually of an occult nature, over persons, events and natural phenomena,
– “planet-ruler” as a white or benevolent witch,
– detachment from ordinary existence.
… is it Stan?
who redirects or takes control of the narrator’s world and directs her life towards charismatic religion?
… is it the narrator?
who takes over the communicative power of others’ minds and spirits (through her “pictures”) and so becomes an illicit source of power and influence?
who violates Stan’s will by verbalizing the abusive images he does not want to hear?
who violates the indigenous sanctity of the Mission mountains by leading Ed’s mother into this spiritual space?
Louise Erdrich,
The Plague of Doves (2008)
– Prefatory “Solo”: 3rd person omniscient narrator, focalized through an anonymous “he” – Evelina: 6 chapters – Judge Antoine Bazil Coutts: 4 chapters – *Marn Wolde: 3 chapters – Evelina: 1 chapter (commentary on Marn Wolde and aftermath of her murder of Billy) – Judge Antoine Bazil Coutts: 1 chapter – Evelina: 3 chapters – Judge Antoine Bazil Coutts: 2 chapters – *Doctor Cordelia Lochren: 1 chapter
- Marn and Cordelia are disruptive narrators, linked by their involvement in the primary problematic of the text: who murdered the Lochren family?
“Satan: Hijacker of a Planet” is located in the middle of the narrative (10 chapters precede it, 8 follow)
The short story is split into three sections:
1. the story up to leading Ed’s mother into the picture = the first chapter of Marn’s narration;
- the account of taking Billy into the Milwaukee picture (pp.160-1) occurs in the third chapter, “The Kindred,” after Marn has acquired her snakes and admits to feeling helpless except with them – and her “pictures”;
- the sexual encounter that concludes the short story occurs after Marn’s return from the fund-raising trip to Seattle and is represented more clearly as a power struggle (Billy does not undress and hurts Marn with his zipper).
Setting
Changes from Creston, Montana to Pluto, North Dakota:
“wandering in the desert”, Marn has “trouble with the pictures” (p.147), which return when she returns to her family farm.
In the opening paragraph, “lodgepole pines” become the “great oak” whose roots suck water “from the bottom of the world” – suggesting the “hanging tree” (“on the edge of Wolde’s land” p.77)
Time
The story has the classical unity of one day;
The novel unfolds over several years (measured by the ages of Marn’s children) but the exact time span and the passage of time are indeterminate:
When exactly does Marn decide to murder Billy?
Characters
Stan becomes Billy Peace and we have the backstory to his character as an Ojibwe man, whose ancestors include the guides who helped found the town of Pluto and one of the lynched men;
Marn is identified as the homodiegetic narrator;
The children of Marn and Billy are added;
Billy’s “ministry”, his congregation, is added as variously “the Daniels” or “the kindred”;
Marn’s story is contextualized by Evelina’s short narration that follows and provides an alternative perspective both on Marn as a character and her story.
The single most important addition to the story is the character of Marn’s Uncle Warren:
He is her grandfather’s brother, “whose dad originally bought the farm” (p.139): in the timescale of the narrative, he would have bought allotted land that was originally Ojibwe land;
Marn’s father is a successful “planter” (putting down roots) as opposed to Uncle Warren BUT in the story her grandfather is the successful farmer as opposed to her father. Also, the grandfather (now absent from the narrative) would be of the generation of lynchers.
Confrontations between Marn and the uncle who claims insight into and affinity with her is added (p.141).
Uncle Warren also has “pictures” (p.146).
Marn: shortened form of Maren = sea
Wolde: archaic form for “child of”
→ underlines her status as a child of immigrant settlers (in contrast with Billy’s indigenous ancestry)
The children of Marn and Billy:
Marn claims (p.168) that she cannot see her features in her son but that her daughter Lilith looks exactly like her.
Judah: the biblical figure saves his brother Joseph from death by suggesting his sale into slavery.
Lilith: in midrashim: first wife of Adam who refused to serve him; in Isaiah 34: screech owl, bringer of death;
in Ojibwemowin “wewendjigano” (owl) shares the same etymological root in proto-Algonquin as “wiindigoo” (cannibalistic monster)
Lilith: associated with snakes
– In Gilgamesh: she is the spirit inhabiting a powerful tree in the base of which lives a serpent; – in the Kabbalah, Lilith is the “Tortuous Serpent”, the first wife of Adam, a serpent that tempts Eve; – In Greco-Roman mythology, she is the daughter of Hecate, human but serpentine from waist down; had the gift of “second sight” but was cursed never to close her eyes, so Zeus allowed her to remove them at will from the sockets.
– Marn’s copperhead snake has hourglass markings (p.160);
“She wore time itself in those hourglasses and I felt the sand rush through them as I let her flow back into her case” (p.162);
– Billy engraves a “figure-eight sign of eternal life” [an hourglass shape] into Marn’s thigh (p.173), reported by Marn as an instance of his abuse but it is the same image that marks her snake;
– when Billy is struck by lightning, Marn describes “A rope of golden fire snakes down and wraps Billy twice” (p.156);
– before she kills Billy, Marn describes herself as “the unturned stone. // And the snake under it, that too” (p.166).
Marn’s self-conscious use of descriptive mythical models:
Marn describes her own pale skin as “Snow White pale, ghost pale, grass pale” (p.171)
She uses the stories of Snow White and Genesis to describe her murder of Billy, killing him with “the apple of good and evil” (p.178).
But to bring these stories into relation with her story, Marn must play the role of the Wicked Stepmother who poisons the apple; she must be the snake whose venom brings about Billy’s (down) Fall.
– The radical inconsistency between Evelina’s description of the 4-B’s diner located in the gracious former National Bank of Pluto (p.190)
versus Marn’s description: “it was a spare room, big and functional” (p.165).
The descriptions share only the orange plastic booths in common. And here Evelina reveals that Marn wears glasses, as in the short story.
– The falsely sinister tone of Marn’s description of the farm: “I couldn’t stop my eyes from catching on certain things—the lock on the gate of the play area, the intercom in diapering, the way the windows shut and locked from the inside, the walls built heavy, reinforced, a bunker” (p.174).
– Marn claims that Billy was persuaded to return to Pluto, North Dakota, by the mention of her family’s land (p.149).
– Later, Marn reports: “The end of our land bumps smack up to the reservation boundary. This was reservation, Billy says, and should be again. This was my family’s land, Indian land. Will be again. He says it flat out with a lack of emotion that disturbs me. Something’s there. Something’s different underneath” (p.152).
– This incident is followed by Marn’s accounts of Billy’s appetite, his bodily expansion and limitless energy (152-55); “the bigger, uncontrollable force that Billy becomes” (154).
– These descriptions of Billy’s size evoke the Ojibwe wiindigoo figure, a cannibalistic monster with an insatiable appetite.
– Upon her return from Seattle, Marn describes Billy as “Not vast as he’d been when he’d absorbed lightning, but big enough” (p.167), casting doubt on his “monstrous” status.
– Evelina describes the “intense blue iris” (p.184) of Marn’s eyes; in the story, it is Stan who has the icy blue eyes characteristic of the wiindigoo.
Other characteristics of the wiindigoo:
– The capacity to run superhumanly fast (pp.175-6: Marn’s “rattlesnake route”);
– The ability to enter the spirit of other people and possess them (Marn’s “pictures”);
– An uncontrollable greed and desire to consume (Marn’s desire for food, land; her instrumentalization of the landscape, objects, other characters);
– cannibalism;
– Common etymology in Ojibwemowin for the screech owl (Lilith) and the wiindigoo.
“ ‘West, always west,’ said Deydey, agreeing slowly. ‘We hear the chimookoman ax ring in the woods, chopping a tree. We should be gone before the tree falls.’
‘We have to stop somewhere, someday.’ Fishtail drew thoughtfully on the pipe and the fragrant smoke clouded his face. ‘West is where the spirits of the dead walk. If the whites keep chasing us west, we’ll end up in the land of the spirits.’ …
‘Thy are like greedy children. Nothing will ever please them for long,’ said Deydey. …
‘Not until they have it all,’ said Fishtail. ‘All of our lands. Our wild-rice beds, hunting grounds, fishing streams, gardens. Not even when we are gone and they have the bones of our loved ones will they be pleased. I have thought about this. … Before they were born, before they came into this world, the chimookoman must have starved as ghosts. They are infinitely hungry.’ ” (pp.79-80).
– Marn’s “picture” after she has killed Billy requires her to hang his body from the rafters, repeating the lynching that haunts the town of Pluto and motivates the entire novel (p.178).
– Marn’s narration concludes with her “picture” of herself as she leaves, taking the money, her children, “and the land deed in my name” (p.179).
– In the next section, in Evelina’s narrative, Marn tells Evelina she has come to town to see the judge and get her land back (p.187).
– Away from her family’s land, Marn “has trouble with the pictures. … And because I could not disappear into my pictures I needed to go home” (p.147).
Uncle Warren tells Marn he can “see it” in her – that she is going to kill (p.158).
These words are repeated in untagged indirect discourse, in a separately demarcated narrative section (p.177).
Billy wishes he could cast out the “something bad” inhabiting Marn; she describes herself as “dark inside” compared with his “light” (p.173); her snakes evoke in her a deep inner cold;
The novel reveals Uncle Warren as the murderer of the Lochren family, the crime for which Billy’s relative was lynched, but not his motive for murder.
– The novel’s setting, “Pluto” evokes Plutus, the Greek god of wealth, and Pluto the ruler of the underworld and god of riches, and also recalls “Satan”;
– The Wolde farm borders both the reservation and the Lochren farm, pointing to the fact that both farms are located on what was once Ojibwe land.
– The novel’s combined imagery of light and vision (“eyes”) links Pluto to the biblical figure of Mammon: representing wealth, greed, gluttony, and materialism.
How is the short story transformed when the story is integrated into a longer narrative?
The story is radicalized:
The covert meanings of the story are made explicit;
This is achieved through the elaboration of figurative language and the workings of the unreliable first-person narrator;
Marn becomes the focal point of a settler-colonial history of murderous land-theft and the destruction of indigenous belief systems: she, through all that she represents, is “Satan, Hijacker of a Planet.”
The story is “indigenized”:
by putting into play Settler and Native histories of the town of Pluto, to “imply an elusive pattern of interaction, … [so that w]hat happens does not ‘develop’ as in a continuous narrative, yet there is the sense that all is not random, disconnected, arbitrary” (Kiernan).
’ “In the beginning, the whites had all the power,” Erdrich says, “but as one reviewer put it: The Indians have the history.” ‘
– interview with John Freeman, 06 June 2008, The Independent
This is a disavowed history; approachable only by indirection, through the “elusive patterns of interaction” constructed covertly in the complex inter-relations – of symbolism, allusion, imagistic accretion, ellipses, semantic gaps – of the discontinuous narrative form.
So where does the story end?
… it does not.
“… the stories are rarely finished with me. They gather force and weight and complexity. Set whirling, they exert some centrifugal influence.”
