Storytelling, Melancholia, And Narrative Structure

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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. 13-36Published by: on behalf of Oxford University Press Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic

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

Jean Wyatt 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

ing fully with the events of her own life; Part Four presents a transformed

Faye, with a new attitude that enables her to connect creatively with the

outside world. Something has changed her—and 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 nothing—or almost

nothing—about 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 of her life. What brings Faye out of her melancholic

state?

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)



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

by exposition" (268). Betty Booth Donohue notes that Native storytellers 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).' Moreover, the reader must make connections in a particular way—

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

help but influence what one sees in a novel—what features stand out and

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

familiarity with psychoanalysis makes me particularly alert to repeated

images of bodily enclosure and bodily containment that surface in Faye's consciousness; these images are for some time the only clues to the nature

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 loss of her sister that has immobilized Faye. The images of physical incorporation that precede and subtend this revelation betray



NARRATIVE STRUCTURE

Faye's melancholic strategy for preserving the dead sister. Arguably, psy

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

inward-turning standpoint of Faye, an emphatically solitary and alienated

individual.

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 studies—a map divided at the moment between

cosmopolitan, postmodern critics on one side and nationalist literary crit

ics on the other3—my 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



WYATT

ter's death is compounded by the betrayal of both parents—the mother's

negligence, the father's destmctiveness, and the failure of both to protect their children—so 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 subject—though 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 death—though 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 writes—but only in the form of a journal written from herself to herself, self-enclosed. Faye is fiercely vigilant in guarding her solitude, maintain

ing a rigid barrier between her internal world and the outside. Why? What

is she protecting?

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 body—her bones, her heart—along 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

—detaching libido from every image, every singular memory of the

beloved—a 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

elaborate on the oral and corporeal aspects of this process: melancholic

identification involves a fantasy of "swallowing that which has been lost.



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 loss—for 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

encapsulation of the dead. When Kurt Krahe's daughter Kendra dies, 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

ing "enters" Faye—intrudes into her inner space—and there it "unfurls."

Expanding, it threatens to take up space dedicated to the preservation of

the dead sister. It is against such incursions that Faye's "heart creaked

shut"—the organ signifying here the closed internal space dedicated to

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

every single one to let it out" (47). The image acknowledges the existence 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 containers—both temporal and spa tial—that 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



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,

however, fragile. Because it is made up of time, of temporal acts daily

repeated, this protective enclosure is vulnerable to the contingencies time

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

and "bring it back" to life, Faye insists that the orchard must remain

"unkempt. . . unproductive . . . branches down, dying" (72). Mirroring the

internal tomb, the orchard's deadwood forms an imaginary crypt for the

sister's 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 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

Faye's—a 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

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 a holding space of suspension. As she acknowledges in the following

pages, her own life was arrested at the moment of her sister's death: "I lost

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

along with the destruction of the external deadwood sepulcher, the walls

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.



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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, "The Visitors," plunges us into the consciousness of a stranger, Bernard, an

Ojibwe on a reservation in North Dakota. Through his eyes, we see Faye 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

long immersion in Faye's consciousness, we expect that the narrative will

continue to respect the conventions, continue to deliver a singular voice

narrating events in linear chronological order. We are after all reading a

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



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

Ojibwe culture, where storytelling, in addition to transmitting lessons in

living to all tribal members, has historically been the means of educating the young: "The sole teaching aid of the Anishinaubaek was the story"

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

knowledge of the drum—its origins, its history—to Faye and her mother.

But his desire to inform the women goes further: he knows about them in

ways that the women do not know about themselves—knows, for instance, 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 epistemology—and 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

rytelling, Erdrich places her reader in the position of a traditional listener

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 is

required if meaning is to emerge. 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



NARRATIVE STRUCTURE

how to live one's life in the present is sought in the ancestors' encounters

with similar situations. 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

round of time" (Rainwater 416).7 A Western-trained reader accustomed to a linear ordering of events

who integrates events as they develop "through textual and temporal suc

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

(109); 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 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;



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 title—a 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 deadness—as in Faye's case—but 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

acknowledges that "living and dead persons [do] not lose contact with

each other" (Vecsey 67). However, the stories suggest more positive, less crippling models of communication with the dead than melancholic

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:

[0]n the way back to my car, I pass a space in the pines that gives out on

a cliff. There must be an air bank rising and falling because the ravens are

playing there. I watch as they throw themselves off a branch into the invisible

stream. Over and over, they tumble into the air and fly upside down. They

twist themselves upright and soar off, sink, then shoot up again over the lip

of rock. Say they have eaten and are made of the insects and creatures that

have lived off the dead in the raven's graveyard—then aren't they the spirits

of the people, the children, the girls who sacrificed themselves, buried here?

And isn't their delight a form of the consciousness we share above and below



NARRATIVE STRUCTURE

the ground and in between, where I stand, right here? One raven veers toward

me, zipping straight at my face, but I do not flinch as its wings brush through

my hair. I call out my sister's name in the wildness of the moment. Then I turn

and watch the raven . . . until she plummets down the cliff again, laughs, and

disappears. (276)

This vision concludes the novel. The spatial imagery announces Faye's release from the stasis and constriction of melancholia. In place of the

closed-in. 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.

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

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



WYATT

reader reliance on the individual. The second narrative move, the collec

tive discourse of Part Two, challenges Western individualist assumptions about the nature of mourning—assumptions reflected in Freud's account

of melancholia and mourning as processes confined to the inner world of

the bereaved 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 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

Shaawano placed 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

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.

By depicting the return of the drum to its living communal context, Erdrich



NARRATIVE STRUCTURE

celebrates 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 dimension of Ojibwe tribal sovereignty by, as American Indian Nationalist

literary critics advocate, "returning] to Native ceremonies and traditions"

(Warrior 88). But such a return, as Nationalist critics also caution, can

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 Note to the text,

by respect for the sanctity of Ojibwe drum ceremonies [277])." Rather, Erdrich gives the drum personal power, so to speak: its interactions with

people change those people's lives.

The drum is depicted as an agent from the moment of its introduction in Part One: it "sounds" when Faye first passes it in the Tatro attic (39); when she touches it, the contact "pull[s] through [her] ... a clear convic

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

as commodities (Faye and her mother are estate agents whose "specialty

[is] Native American antiquities" [29]) and moves her into an Ojibwe dis

course within which sacred objects replenish the lives of the Ojibwe—as 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



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from a Manitou in a dream. The drum is "the materialization of a [dream] vision in an artifact" (Vennum 148); it thus carries powers transmitted

directly from the spirit world. The Painted Drum modifies tradition some

what: it is not a Manitou who gives Old Shaawano the design, but rather

the dead daughter who appears to her grieving father in a dream and

directs him to make the drum: nonetheless, the inspiration for the drum

comes 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, 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

Four, carry the same title—"Revival Road"—and the novel ends at the

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 form of what Gordon Henry terms "sacred concentricity" (qtd. in Blaeser 57) with the creation story of the drum at its center—a 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 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 orchard—moribund, ghostly, and unchanging—functioned 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

coyotes, whose 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

recognition of Faye—"seeming to know who I am"—completes the cycle begun with Bernard's promise to convey to Faye "who [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

great medicine power, as Susan Scarberry-Garcia notes: "Bear is the liv

ing embodiment of the 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"



WYATT

to tribal lands—although she does plan to return to the reservation to par

ticipate in the ceremonies of the drum—as to a homing out, a relocation

and reconstruction of the Ojibwe landscape and its animals in the place of

exile. Faye's model of cultural mobility seems adaptive to a time of Native

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 obsessed by the picture of his mother throwing his

sister to the wolves:

Have you ever considered, I asked him, given how your sister was so

tenderhearted and brave, that she looked at the whole situation? She saw the

wolves were only hungry, she saw their need was only need. She knew you

were back there, alone in the snow. She saw the baby she loved would not live without a mother. . . . She saw clearly that one person on the wagon had to

offer themself, or they all would die. And in that moment of knowledge, don't

you think being who she was, of the old sort of Anishinaabeg who thinks of

the good of the people first, she jumped, my father, n'deydey, brother to that

little girl, don't you think she lifted her shawl and flew? (116-17).

The son's alternative version of reality—a story of loving self-sacrifice,

strength, even beauty—challenges the horrific story frozen in the father's

mind, providing him with a new perspective on the traumatic past. Bernard

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, she stepped off a high branch. Daddy let me drop. She saw him let me

fall. Maybe she thought I was dead. I don't know. She just stepped off. The car

was gone. You were off somewhere. Where?" . . .



NARRATIVE STRUCTURE

"I was with someone."

"You had an affair?" . . .

She nods and says quietly, "I was not home very much at all. Don't you

remember?"

I'm quiet and at a loss for a moment, then I ask, suddenly shy, "Did you

love him?" "Of course. . . . Inordinately, foolishly," she whispers, then looks up at me.

"But that is the way people should be loved" (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"

(263). 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

"differing stories" will challenge her own.

Faye could maintain the stasis of her melancholy adherence to the dead

sister and to the unchanging moment of loss—she could keep her own

story intact—only by walling out the other's differing story and its chal

lenge to her own psychic truth. Now, Faye and her mother each registers

"surprise" at the other's account of Netta's death (264). "Surprise" signals a sudden shift in each woman's 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

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 in which the other's story simul

taneously reflects one's own experience 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

voiced by Paula Gunn Allen and Leslie Marmon Silko, tribal storytelling comforts and heals through similarity, as a listener is assured that "no



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 grateful to the following readers of this essay, who not only suggested ways

to strengthen the writing, but also contributed their own ideas to extend and enrich

my argument: Susan Bernardin, Cristina Escobar, Greg Forter, Doreen Fowler,

Forrest Flavens, Lynne Layton, Todd McGowan, Frances Restuccia, and Victor

Wolfenstein.

1. In this essay I use "Native," "Native American," and "American Indian" inter

changeably. Each of these terms comes freighted with issues of identity and his

tory—notably, in Susan Bernardin's words, "issues of resistance to the colonial

imposition of names by the dominant culture of the United States" (156). See

Bernardin for a discussion of the advantages and drawbacks of the various des

ignations. 2. At the time of this writing, only one essay, by Karah Stokes, has been pub

lished on The Painted Drum. No essays on storytelling in The Painted Drum

have appeared; however, Erdrich's use of traditional storytelling techniques in her

earlier novels has been widely discussed. In her reading of Tales of Burning Love

(1996), Roberta Rosenberg writes of storytelling as healing: Louise Erdrich "uses

storytelling as a means of salvation ... a communal ceremony which restores

health" (127). James Ruppert lists several characteristics of "a traditional storytell

er's art" that Erdrich incorporates into Love Medicine ("Mediation" 231). Hertha

D. Sweet Wong uses the figure of a web for Love Medicine's narrative structure

in order to capture "the cyclical and recursive nature of stories that are informed

by both modernist literary strategies (for instance, multiple narrative voices) and

oral traditions (such as a storyteller's use of repetition, recurrent development,

and associational structure)" (87). James Flavin notes that Tracks constructs the

narrations by the storyteller Nanapush as an oral communication addressed by

Nanapush to his granddaughter Lulu (1-3). Elizabeth Gargano emphasizes the

"Ojibwa story cycle elements" in Erdrich's two novels for children, 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 and Elvira Pulitano find poststructuralist and postcolonial theories useful

in interpreting Native American works and argue for hybridity and cross-cul

tural dialogue. They explore the convergence of Native and Western voices in

what Ruppert calls a "mediational discourse" ("Mediation" 229-30). See also

the essays on postmodern approaches to Native literature collected by Gerald



NARRATIVE STRUCTURE

Vizenor. American Indian Nationalist critics call for an interpretational frame

work grounded in indigenous cultural contexts and carrying on indigenous intel

lectual traditions and epistemologies—a framework that contributes to American

Indian intellectual sovereignty. This is a tribal-specific ethic, aimed at building

tribal sovereignty. Daniel Heath Justice notes: "Tribal-specific criticism links the

critic and his/her work to a living kinship community with a political, cultural and

historical specificity" (211). From a nationalist perspective that asserts "the right of Native people to interpret their own literature" as "an important exercise of

sovereignty" (Womack 29), the imposition of European or Euro-American theo

retical frames on Native literature can appear to be a new act of colonization and

appropriation (Blaeser 55). John Camber's recent essay on Craig S. Womack's

Drowning in Fire provides an excellent model of nationalist criticism. For the

nationalist argument, see Kimberly Blaeser, Justice, Kimberly Roppolo, Robert

Allen Warrior, Jace Weaver, and Womack. For accounts of the debate itself, see

Gamber 119, note 1; Justice 209-215; and Weaver et al.

4. The one artifact Faye keeps for herself from her dealings in estates is a wooden

box belonging to the dead it contains layers of handkerchiefs, each care

fully labeled with the event that caused L.M.B.'s tears: "Teddy's Funeral . . . My

Mother's Funeral," and so on. This "box containing a woman's lifetime of tears"

(35) is homologous to the psychic container that holds Faye's frozen grief.

5. Trauma theory today, including literary criticism on trauma narratives, is domi

nated by the theoretical framework introduced in Cathy Caruth's edited collec

tion, Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Bessel A. van der Kolk and Onno van

der Hart's essay in that volume provides the neurobiological model for Caruth's

and other contributors' emphasis on chronologically organized narrative as the

cure for traumatic memory. Once translation into sequential linear narrative has

occurred, the theory goes, trauma can be integrated into normal or narrative mem

ory and symptoms of involuntary memory, such as flashbacks and re-enactments,

subside (Van der Kolk and Van der Hart 176). The Painted Drum's presentation

of a collective healing process that makes listening to others' stories even more

important than telling one's own provides an alternative, communal therapeutics.

6. Greg Sarris describes how Pomo storyteller Mabel McKay frames her stories

for a Western audience in such a way that the listener is led to examine the cultural

preconceptions and epistemology he or she brings to the listening, as well as to

encounter the differences of a Pomo worldview (19-24). Both Sarris and Womack

include the responses of the listeners as part of the telling. Thus, Sarris describes

how McKay's stories extend into an internal dialogue in the listener's mind

(37-39). Womack recounts at length his own responses to the Creek elder Linda

Alexander's performance of the Turtle story, insisting that his own experience

of the story is "part of the story also" (99). Nationalist critics stress the nation

building aspects of storytelling. Womack, for example, writes: "Their storytelling

constitutes an art of Creek survival. Creek nationalism is created through Creek

narrative: the two form an interdependency" (62).

7. Catherine Rainwater's essay on Love Medicine eloquently describes the prin

ciples of cyclical or ceremonial time: "Ceremonial time is cyclic rather than linear,



WYATT

accretive rather than incremental . . . the text implies that cyclic patterns . . . best

disclose the meanings of individual lives" (416). 8. While no articles on reader response to The Painted Drum have yet appeared,

several critics have commented on the effects that the multiple narratives of Love

Medicine have on readers. Lydia A. Schultz notes: "Erdrich incorporates the rich

legacy of Ojibwe oral traditions and teaching methods into Love Medicine. Her

narrative strategy demands that her readers seek that knowledge by working to

integrate the components of the text and to recognize the cyclic patterns it con

tains" (84). Kathleen M. Sands remarks that the continual changes of narrative

perspective force the reader "to shift position, turn, ponder, and finally integrate

the story into a coherent whole" (35). Rainwater says that Love Medicine's dis

ruption of Western codes of time, plot and character "frustrate narrativity," the

process through which the reader makes sense of a novel; that frustration leads

to the reader's experience of a text-induced marginality (406); however, this dis

location ultimately produces "epistemological insight" into both Native and non

Native codes (422). Ruppert claims that Love Medicine's narrative techniques

shift "the epistemological perspective of the implied non-Native reader" toward

"a more Native American appreciation of meaning and knowledge" while it posi

tions Native readers "to value Western perspectives on meaning" ("Celebrating"

81). E. Shelley Reid argues that participatory reading of Love Medicine teaches

a (Euro-American) reader to expand his or her model of the self to include "lives

and selves [that] are as mutable and inextricably woven together as their stories"

(76). 9. The same has been said of Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony (1977) (Lincoln

237; Mitchell 27; Owens 95). The text of The Painted Drum leaves more unsaid

and hence engages the performative dimension of reading more than Ceremony

does.

10. Thomas Vennum gives details of the Ojibwe ceremonial drum's mythical

origins (44-45), its migrations from tribe to tribe, and its ceremonial uses. In

close collaboration with William Baker, an Ojibwe drum maker who for fifteen

years was Vennum's mentor, he details the proper construction of such a drum.

Tara Browner writes that present-day Ojibwe "consider their drum to be a living

entity"; they show respect for it, give feasts for it, and dedicate themselves to

"taking care of it" (135). Browner's 2002 study of Native American music and

ceremony attests to the power of the ceremonial drum's voice for contemporary

Native Americans who participate in drum ceremonies and powwows; "When

approaching a pow-wow . . . there's the drumbeat itself. It echoes out into the sky

and rumbles down through the earth, representing the heartbeat of all humanity.

Over and over when 1 ask singers and dancers about their pow-wow experiences

they refer to the drum and the power of its sound" (87). Browner's study updates

and corrects Vennum's ethnographic (sometimes even elegiac) tone, which some

times conveys the impression that the Ojibwe drum and its ceremonies are vanish

ing traditions. 11. For a first-hand account of the Ojibwe drum ceremony's power of healing, see

Melvin Eagle's oral history of the Mille Lacs drum ceremony that cured his crip



NARRATIVE STRUCTURE

pling back ailment (103-05). 12. The circling patterns of the dances in turn reflect "how the people live in

motion within the circling spirals of time and space" (Allen, Sacred 150). Gordon

Henry's lecture at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee goes on to explain that

classic Native American novels (Ceremony, Love Medicine, and House Made of

Dawn) "create a sacred center from which emanate ripples of power and connec

tion" (qtd. in Blaeser 58). See also Louis Owens's description of Ceremony as a

work that follows the Pueblo worldview wherein "all orientation is centripetal,

toward the sacred center, an imaginative construct evoked in the inward-spiraling

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

pattern in Native American poetry: "Its sequences relate to the integrity of the

circle, not the directional determination of the line. It encompasses, it does not

point" (ix). 13. The idea that Faye recreates an Ojibwe landscape by populating the New

England countryside with various animals of Ojibwe significance was suggested

to me by Susan Bernardin.

14. Karah Stokes discusses issues of Ojibwe identity in The Painted Drum, argu

ing that it is behavior, not blood, that determines tribal identity. 15. Cristina Escobar suggested this line of thinking.

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Documents

Storytelling, Melancholia, And Narrative Structure