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Issues in Louise Erdrich'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 Nestor 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 Put/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 woman ness and suffered.
Still, Agnes was certain now that she had done the right thing. Father Damien Modeste had arrived here. The true Modeste who was supposed to arrive - none other. No one else. " (Ott, Book List). From the first mass she celebrates, while a small band of nuns with frostbitten cheeks looks on, Agnes is tested in body and spirit. Having already survived so much, though, she's blessed with a sense that she cannot be harmed.
Only a wholehearted devotion to the healing effect of forgiveness enables her to survive, thrive, and bless these often desperate people. "What is the whole of our existence, " she asks, "but the sound of an appalling love?" (Morey, 2001). Over the next 80 years, she struggles with questions of faith, searching for and eventually finding a divine trunk beneath the branches of her own theology and the native spirituality of the people she serves. In her depiction of the intersection of these two faiths, Erdrich celebrates what's holy in both. Agnes's unanswered letters to the pope gradually grow into a kind of diary, a place to wonder and pray, vent and question. The novel opens toward the end of her long life, when she is fully and happily integrated into the social structure of the reservation.
The Rev. Jude Miller, a young, prudish priest, has arrived to investigate the possible beatification of a local nun, the late Sister Leopolda. Despite the intervening decades, Agnes remembers her well, and she remembers nothing good about her: "She was a spiritual arsonist. " In the course of their wandering interview, Agnes tells Father Jude the history of her own life with the Ojibwe in a startling collection of stories that shift like seasons from tragedy to humor, legend, and mysticism. Father Jude is annoyed and profoundly unsettled by Father Damien's ambiguous attitudes, but among the wrenching stories of disease, insanity, and revenge are some sparklingly funny tales that capture the rich complexity of these people's lives.
In one episode, a statue of Mary flies through the wall of a cabin and converts a group of alcoholics. And in the destined-to-be-classic story of Nanapush hunting the moose, we see a wild combination of Woody Allen and native-American sensibilities. (Louise Erdrich, American Literature profile). Even the small incidents in this novel are moments of tremendous power, stripped of sentimentality or pretension. Erdrich has developed a style that can sound as serious as death or ring with the haunting simplicity of ancient legend.
Let's hope this isn't really the last report on the miracles at Little No Horse. In the closing lines of Louise Erdrich's new novel, Father Damien Modeste is being buried in the nearby lake. "As the dark water claimed him, his features blurred. His body wavered for a time between the surface and the feminine depth below, " Erdrich writes. (Hansem, 2000). That water language concludes the internal metaphoric structure of this complicated narrative, which draws alternately upon water and music for expressing the mystery of boundary and transformation between multiple worlds: men and women, Native American and Christian, animal and human, comic and tragic, human and divine.
Through a series of stories that move back and forth in time, the "shape-shifting" that typifies Native American storytelling is brought into conversation with the Christian idea of "conversion, " and the history of cultural encounter is re-formed in a way that preserves an essential, shared loveliness in each tradition without falsifying the loss and pain that accompanies the encounter between the two. (Ott, Book List). This shape-shifting is embodied by Father Damien himself, for Damien is actually Agnes DeWitt. Readers know the priest's real identity from the very beginning, for it is the richness of its implications that is the mystery, not the deception itself. The story begins in i 996, in the twilight of Father Damien's long, devoted service, when the Vatican has sent a representative to investigate the miraculous life of Sister Leopolda.
However, as the Vatican representative discovers, Sister Leopolda's twisted sainthood is not nearly as interesting as the surprising sainthood of Father Damien. (Hansem, 2000). Agnes DeWitt was literally swept away by flood waters to the remote Ojibwe reservation. There she donned the robes of Father Damien Modeste, drowned on his way to assume his assignment on the reservation, and thus begins his / her lifetime of secret service. A cross-cultural love story also begins, for Damien loves Nanapush, the local trickster, and his extended family -- Fleur Pillager, Margaret Kashpaw, Lulu Nanapush and Mary Kashpaw.
Later, Agnes also falls in love with Father Gregory Wekkle, who is sent to assist Damien at the reservation, and for the second time in her life she becomes a joyously realized, sexual woman. When Gregory leaves, Damien intends to end his life. But when he goes to say goodbye to his friend, Nanapush puts up a sweat lodge for him and brings him back from despair. Damien discovers that he "loved not only the people but also the very thinness of the world, " and Agnes finds her salvation "composed of the very great and the very small. The vast comfort of a God who comforted her in a language other than her own. " (Ott, Book List). In the inarticulate devotion of the abandoned, abused Mary Kashpaw, the face of Christ is revealed to Damien, who on his deathbed prepares himself for Ojibwe afterlife.
Through such moments, Erdrich imagines the ways Christian and Native American spiritual systems sink into one another until one becomes the other, again and again. (A Reader's Guide to the Novels of Louise Erdrich). This is the miracle of Erdrich's writing. She conveys the fluidity of meanings across religious systems and across time through her full, rich characters: from the furious piety of Leopolda and the patient service of the little community of nuns, to the astringent love of Margaret for her wily Nanapush and the extravagant love of Damien for his / her chosen people, which has been expressed by absolving all who asked for forgiveness. (Hansem, 2000). Words: 2, 048. Bibliography: A Reader's Guide to the Novels of Louise Erdrich- web Book review of "A Reader's Guide to the Novels of Louise Erdrich" Hansem, L. Interview: "The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse." New York: Viking Press, 2000.
Louise Erdrich- web Portraits in American Literature profile, featuring extensive bibliography. Louise Erdrich's Bibliography - web Bibliography of poetry, novels and other works Morey, A. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. Christian Century, Sept 26, 2001. Ott, B. Review of The Last Report...
from Book List Spillman, R. Interview with Louise Erdrich at Salon. com
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