Root And Route:Erdrich’s Writing On The Survivance In Catastrophe

Louise Erdrich (1954-) is a prominent Ojibway writer as well as one of the most influential contemporary American novelists. A series of her works have been published to date since her debut in the American literary circle in the1980s, including thirteen novels, five children’s books, three collections of poems and two memoirs, which have won her the American National Book Award and other ten plus awards. The themes and art of her novels, especially of the ones that she completed before1996have been studied by academia abroad in various perspectives, such as narratology, native culture, feminism, ecologism, genealogy, etc. The present dissertation, on the other hand, focuses on the eight novels she wrote after1996and tries to probe in the theme of "survivance in catastrophes", one of the core values of Erdrich’s works. One of the important reasons of selecting those texts, apart from the expectation for initiating a new research field, is that1996was the very year when Erdrich divorced her husband Michael Dorris and the following year witnessed the suicide of the latter; those incidents had actually put a period to the "collaborative writing" claimed repeatedly by the previous couple in some interviews. The focus on "survivance in catastrophe" is also out of the author’s emphasizing on the theme of her writing,"contemporary Native American writers have therefore a task quite different from that of other writers I’ve mentioned. In the light of enormous loss, they must tell the stories of contemporary survivors while protecting and celebrating the cores of cultures lfet in the work of the catastrophe."This dissertation consists of the foreword, chapter1-5and the conclusion.The foreword retrospects American Indian literature renaissance and Erdrich’s writing career, summarizes the research status of the author, and presents the basic thoughts and main contents of the paper.The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, Four Souls, the Painted Drum and Shadow Tag are selected in Chapter1-4as the research texts. The survivance strategies of Ojibwa confronted with catastrophes related to religion, earth, trauma and invention in the four novels are transboundary and hybridity, communication and fusion, memory and return, as well as resistance and remodeling respectively. The introduction of these strategies exposes nothing but the fact that the author holds fast to her native culture more than she assimilates the white culture.Centering on the "windigo characters" and "the survivance in windigo’s mouth", Chapter5analyzes the eight novels Erdrich created after1996, especially the three typical ones, the Antelope Wife, the Plague of Doves, and the Round House. The image of windigo, in the author’s eyes, is the general catastrophes discussed in the previous chapters as well as the recurrences of specific characters. Erdrich reconnects her writing in the contemporary context to the traditional Ojibway culture through reviving the ancient "windigo" in that archaic culture; therefore, besides the rejuvenation of the Ojibway religion and their thoughts on earth, the Ojibway tradition of story-telling manages to rejuvenate as well.The conclusion section summarizes the significance of Erdrich’s writing from her "rejuvenating the traditional Ojibway culture" and walking "toward a minor literature". The author is believed to undertake her writing in a posture of opposing the mainstream and the authorities and flourishing in edge. It is by this kind of writing that Erdrich steps forward to the "minor literature" stressed by Deleuze and Guattari while being a practitioner herself in "protecting and celebrating the cores of cultures lfet in the work of the catastrophe".It is a must to mention that the term "survivance" is from the relevant conception put forward by Gerald Vizenor (1934-), an Ojibway theorist. In the meantime, combined with Ojibway culture and history, a number of theories are referred to in the specific analyses of the texts and contribute to understanding the details of the novels, such as liminal space by Bhabha, trauma theories by Caruth and LaCapra, memory by Halbwachs and simulacra by Baudrillard. The methodology mainly consists of intensive reading of the texts and comparative study.The reflection of Ojibway current living condition and the exploration of their survivance approaches, which are highlighted in Erdrich’s novels, are of significance for many other foreigners like us as well. The dilemma of Ojibwa mirrors, to some degree, the baffling situation the modern civilization comes across, especially in America:the commercialization of the society, the complanation of the spiritual world, the indifference among individuals, the expansion of desires, these are just like the windigo, putting people in jeopardy. Everyone should be cautious about "windigo"—neither become it nor be swallowed. This is no doubt the practical significance of the author’s writing, as well as the purpose of research on "survivance in catastrophes" of her novels in this paper.