Abstract

The concept of Zwischenraum, or in between spaces, acts as a site for productive silences in Erdrich’s novel, The Painted Drum. These productive silences can be read as intervals of transitions and as sites of potential where Erdrich’s narrating characters underscore the importance of writing, storytelling, and literary production. Drawing on Cheryl Glenn’s ideas of rhetorical silences, this essay explores the use of silence as a chosen, productive rhetorical strategy for creating, connecting, and continuing narratives; silence is not nothingness. Faye Travers, one of The Painted Drum’s central narrating characters, appropriates the importance of Zwischenraum as a world view and as an imagined site for her narrative creation. Silence as a metaphorical in between space, or as an imagined space of potential, enables the writer-character of Faye Travers to connect her story with those of her co-narrators, Bernard Shaawano and Fleur Pillager. I propose that a closer reading of Zwischenraum as a metaphor for narrative creation offers insights into Faye’s social silence and her perceived withdrawal from the world; upon finding the eponymous drum, the one-quarter Ojibwe Faye Travers redefines Zwischenraum. In redefining Zwischenraum as a site for belonging, Faye the silent listener and writer understands that the pairing of narrative and silence (and not silence alone) connects her to people.

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