Issues In Louise Erdriche's Essay - 2,170 words

Issues in Louise Erdriche's "The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse" On the opening pages of Louise Erdrich's new novel, "The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse," we're introduced to the central character of Father Damian Modeste. He has spent the past half-century ministering to the Ojibwa people on a remote reservation in North Dakota, and keeping a deep secret. The 80-year-old Catholic priest is actually a woman named Agnes DeWitt. The fantastic idea appealed to Louise Erdrich because the story of a woman who assumes the identity of a priest offered the author the chance to explore such issues as assimilation, subjugation and conversion on many different levels. (Louise Erdrich,American Literature profile). Erdrich grew up in North Dakota, has German heritage and is also a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of the Ojibwa. Although "The Last Report on The Miracles at Little No Horse" is fiction - there was no actual Father Damian - Erdrich says the book is based on research, including missionary letters and journals.


(Louise Erdrich's Bibliography). The dedication page of Louise Erdrich's latest novel, "The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse" begins with what appears to be an American Indian tribal word, "Nindinawemaganido," followed by an incantatory paragraph outlining the "four layers" above and below the earth through which, Erdrich suggests, we drift as we dream. (Spillman, Interview at Salon.com). So many of this novel's strengths and weaknesses are neatly distilled in this opening page. Although it resonates with the kind of authentic Indian culture contained in many of Erdrich's works, the story line tends to get bogged down in baroquely phrased scenes delving too deeply into the "before" rather than the "now" of the story. (Louise Erdrich's Bibliography). Erdrich, a writer who is part American Indian, had back-to-back-to-back successes of "Love Medicine," "The Beet Queen" and "Tracks." She gained national attention with her uncanny ability to blend the mystical power of her strong-willed characters into poetic literary architecture.


The story returns to the Ojibwe natives of North Dakota depicted in her earlier novels, including "Love Medicine," for which she won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983. Although fans recognize characters from those books, this novel approaches the community from a distance, in the voice of an unusual stranger. (Spillman, Interview at Salon.com). Agnes DeWitt, of rural Wisconsin, would have spent her quiet life teaching in the convent were it not for her love of Chopin. So passionate is her playing that the other nuns wake in a troubling sweat. When the Mother Superior removes the piano stool, Agnes plays on her knees. Asked to stop, she takes off her habit and wanders back into the world.


She has the good fortune to find a man who loves her as much as she loves music, but just as her heart expands to include him, she's widowed in one of the novel's many spectacular episodes. Alone, homeless, and drowning in an awesome flood, she finds the body of a dead priest tangled in a tree and steals his identity. (Hansem, 2000). Referring to her protagonist as both "he" and "she" (often within the same paragraph and not without occasional awkwardness), Erdrich depicts Father Damien's life largely in relation to the other inhabitants of Little No Horse. Housekeeper and nurse Mary Kashpaw (who may have murdered the man who raped her, years earlier) subsumes her own life in that of the elderly priest, accepting the faith he embodies, even sending her (irreversibly worldly) son Nector to the church, to learn for himself "whether there is something to this God." (Morey, 2001). The tribal elder Nanapush, whose rudely comical tales and never-ending womanizing make him a perfect foil for Father Damien, guesses his friend's secret.


And there is Father Gregory Wekkle, sent to Little No Horse as Father Damien's assistant, who endures a bizarre test of his own faith when he becomes her lover. As always with Erdrich, other stories split off from, echo, or amplify the novel's main concerns. The most important are anecdotes detailing the experiences of Pauline Puyat/Sister Leopolda, a healer whose charitable acts appear (to Father Damien, at least) to be motivated by fantasies of revenge upon her many enemies. The priest envisions her as absorbed in "a darkness not to be assuaged by common means," sensing that her fatally divided nature has apocalyptic resonances ("was what came next, beyond the end of things. ... Yes, Leopolda was the hope and she was the poison").


(Ott, Book List). One can argue that this teeming novel contains a few too many characters and subplots. Perhaps, but who would wish to sacrifice the magnificent extended description of a bloody buffalo hunt, or the vivid digressive account of Fleur Pillager's crafty vengeance upon the white entrepreneurs who had stolen her land? Nanapush's extravagant whopper of a tale about the farcical slaughter of a terrified "captive" moose is a virtuoso piece of writing that compares favorably with the best such storytelling of Faulkner and Twain at their comic peaks. (Morey, 2001). Nevertheless, it is the dual figure of Father Damien--nd "his" resolve to live in the worlds of both flesh and spirit--that gives this novel its unusual resonance. Erdrich adds yet another level of qualification and complexity by placing many of Father Damien's detailed memories in his carefully considered replies to questions posed by his colleague Father Jude Miller, the emissary who is sent to investigate the enigma of Sister Leopolda. It's an outrageous move for Agnes and Erdrich, the sort of gender-bending gimmick that threatens the novel's seriousness. But great triumphs arise from great risks, and "The Last Report" transcends its transsexual plot to stand firmly on the bedrock of human nature. In both conception and execution, it's a marvelous accomplishment.


(Hansem, 2000). Before Agnes arrives at Little No Horse in 1912 as Father Damien, she has never seen an American Indian. Living "the most sincere lie a person could ever tell," she walks with bloodied feet into a community ravaged by disease and sapped by clever lumbermen. "In that period of regard," when she first sees her modest cabin, "the unsettled intentions, the fears she felt, the exposure she already dreaded, faded to a fierce nothing, a white ring of mineral ash left after the water had boiled away. There would be times that she missed the ease of moving in her old skin, times that Father Damien was pierced by womanness and suffered. Still, Agnes was certain now that she had done the right thing. Father Damien Modeste h ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

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