The Politics of Metafiction in Louise Erdrich's Four Souls

Louise Erdrich's recent novel Four Souls (2004) continues where her well-known novel Tracks (1988) left off, telling the story of her fictional Ojibwe reservation in the aftermath of allotment policy and the widespread logging of woodlands. Chronologically located between her most popular novels Tracks (which takes place from 1912 to 1924) and Love Medicine (which takes place from the 1930s to 1984), Four Souls bridges the narrative gaps in the stories of recurring characters like Nanapush and Fleur Pillager. Originally conceived as an expanded version of Tracks, Four Souls features parallel plots that depict Fleur's attempt to reclaim her land from lumber baron John Mauser and finally heal her bitterness, alongside Nanapush's analogous effort to hold onto the remaining tribal land and repair his acerbic relationship with his partner Margaret.

In the novel's epilogue, Nanapush, tribal elder and resident trickster, self-consciously reflects on the whole "scope and drift" of the region's history, lamenting the fact that people now "print [themselves] deeply on the earth" with roads, automobiles, and modern buildings that transform the reservation and threaten tribal sovereignty (210). He contrasts these destructive markings that "bite deep" and cause the "bush" to "recede" with the printed tracks of his own words. Continuing the titular metaphor from Tracks, he muses:

"I have left my own tracks, too. I have left behind these words. But even as I write them down I know they are merely footsteps in the snow. They will be gone by spring. New growth will cover them, and me. That green in turn will blacken. . . . All things familiar dissolve into strangeness. Even our bones nourish change."

(210)

By redefining "words" as "tracks" and the "deep" tracks as a form of "print," Nanapush links stories with the material world and specifically with the political context of land use. He draws attention not only to how roads, cars, and buildings affect the earth but also to the historical narratives of progress that legitimize their impact. The deep printing of modern technology disrupts both the local woodlands and the communal identity of a "people who [once] left no tracks" (210). By comparing his own writing with plant life, Nanapush situates his "words" and himself in a larger natural cycle of decay and renewal. While he is clearly critical of "deep printing," Nanapush neither calls for a wholesale rejection of narratives of "modernity" nor offers his own narrative as a simple alternative. Instead, he self-consciously defines his story as a temporary and partial means of orientation (tracks) and as an impermanent but nourishing contribution to storytelling (plant life). Although his story cannot provide a fixed or complete account of "reality" or history, Nanapush's narrative does suggest the positive value of literary self-consciousness for examining both. His narratorial intrusions throughout the novel allow him to undermine dominant discourses about places and identities without either reproducing totalizing narratives—a form of "deep printing"—or advocating passive relativism.

While many of Erdrich's texts feature the experimental form and self-conscious narrators associated with postmodern narrative, this novel, most of which is "written" by Nanapush with the "stub of a grain dealer's pencil," offers a particularly rich and complex demonstration of how Erdrich Indigenizes "metafictive" techniques (58). Reading Four Souls as metafiction—fiction that theorizes storytelling—enables us to better understand the novel's political implications. In order to scrutinize the role of narrative in legitimating the colonization of Native land and peoples, Erdrich Indigenizes metafiction for an Ojibwe political context. In so doing, she reappropriates metafictive form, once considered a solipsistic Western mode, to destabilize dominant narratives of land and identity without replicating their totalizing political force. By modeling her metafiction on the Ojibwe trickster, Erdrich transforms metafiction into a political form of storytelling embedded in community and adaptable to the evolving challenges of Native survival.

The novel's form, like its content, calls attention to the political potential of the process of storytelling. Through their juxtaposition, the stories of the text's multiple narrators call attention to themselves as artful form. The first...