Chapter Three—
Comic Liberators and Word-Healers:
The Interwoven Trickster Narratives of Louise Erdrich

The trickster's constant chatterings and antics remind us that life is endlessly narrative, prolific and openended.
William Hynes, Mythical Trickster Figures

From the first publication of Love Medicine in 1984, tricksters have played a central and pervasive role in Louise Erdrich's fiction.^[1] A family of tricksters wanders through Love Medicine , Tracks , and The Bingo Palace . The very existence of such a trickster "family" as Erdrich's rewrites a major tenet of a trickster tradition in which the trickster always travels alone. Erdrich's novels transgress trickster traditions in other ways as well, revising traditional myths, and in the cases of Fleur and Lulu, combining parts of several myths and pushing the limits of our conception

of the trickster. Erdrich's tricksters can't be contained, whether in a body, in a prison, in a single story or novel, or—as the expanded 1993 edition of Love Medicine suggests—even in a particular version of a novel.

Several of Erdrich's characters bear important resemblances to Chippewa trickster Nanabozho, and her work offers a trickster-inspired view of identity, community, history, and narrative. As the community evolves, so do the novels' narrative forms. Indeed, the evolving narrative forms of Love Medicine , Tracks , and The Bingo Palace express the history of a Chippewa community in trickster terms that, far from reinforcing stereotypes of a vanishing tribe, emphasize variety, vibrancy, and continuance. Tricksters' ability to escape virtually any situation and survive any adventure makes them particularly appealing to an artist like Erdrich, who feels that Native American writers, "in the light of enormous loss, must tell the stories of contemporary survivors, while protecting and celebrating the cores of cultures left in the wake of the catastrophe ("Where" 23). Through trickster characters and a trickster aesthetic, Erdrich attests to the personal and cultural survival of the Chippewa people.

In Erdrich's works, tricksters are central to the formulation of identity, the creation of community and the preservation of culture. Through their courageous, outrageous stories, their transgressions not only of law and convention but also of flesh and blood, Erdrich's tricksters are, to borrow Gerald Vizenor's words, "enchanter[s], comic liberator[s], and word healer[s]" (Trickster of Liberty x). Erdrich's works convey a tricksterlike delight in the margin as a place of connection and transformation. Her novels focus our attention on these interconnections, not only between characters but also among the various stories and

across the novels. The new and expanded version of Love Medicine heightens and reinforces the interconnections among the novels, while questioning the stability of the novel as a form. In keeping with Erdrich's aesthetic of interconnection, my discussion focuses first on the trickster's relationship to identity and then on the trickster-inspired narrative structures that link family, the community, and the novels.

Trickster Identity: Love Medicine and Tracks

That tricksters inspire Erdrich's formulation of identity may appear at first a risky claim. After all, the trickster embodies paradox; his or her ever-shifting form seems to negate the possibility of any "stable" identity. Yet paradox is a part of Native American (and postmodern) conceptions of identity, and the shiftiness defines the trickster's identity. If aptly directed, Erdrich suggests, a trickster-inspired view of identity can be liberating and empowering. Traditionally, the Chippewa trickster Nanabozho is "the master of life—the source and impersonation of the lives of all sentient things, human, faunal, and floral. . . . He was regarded as the master of ruses but also possessed great wisdom in the prolonging of life" (Densmore 97). As the "master of ruses," Nanabozho wields as his chief weapon the power of transformation. Nanabozho could "assume at will . . . a new form, shape, and existence"; he "could be a man, and change to a pebble in the next instant. He could be a puff of wind, a cloud fragment, a flower, a toad" (Johnston 19–20). Using his transformational powers to escape from difficult situations and attack his enemies, Nanabozho's transformational ability implies control over his physical

boundaries. It is the trickster's questioning of physical boundaries that is central to Erdrich's vision of identity based on connections to myth and community.

As I argue elsewhere in detail, Erdrich views identity as "transpersonal": a strong sense of self must be based not on isolation but on personal connections to community and to myth (see Smith). In Love Medicine , Erdrich translates the concept of a fluid, transpersonal identity in concretely physical terms: bodies become boundaries, outer layers that limit and define individuals. Characters flow out of their bodies and open themselves up to engulf the world. Even death does not contain them. Those characters gifted with Nanabozho's ability to control, or dissolve, their own physical boundaries have the strongest identities.

On the night of her homecoming at the beginning of Love Medicine , Albertine Johnson experiences a mystical merging with the northern lights as she lies in a field next to her cousin Lipsha. Her description shows how a physical connection to myth, community, and the landscape provides strength.

Northern lights. Something in the cold, wet atmosphere brought them out. I grabbed Lipsha's arm. We floated into the field and sank down. . . . Everything seemed to be one piece. The air, our faces, all cool, moist, and dark, and the ghostly sky. . . . At times the whole sky was ringed in shooting points . . . pulsing, fading, rhythmical as breathing . . . as if the sky were a pattern of nerves and our thoughts and memories traveled across it . . . one gigantic memory for us all. (LM 37)^[2]

Albertine's vision of a vast, universal brain, of which her own face forms a part, expresses what William Bevis calls "transpersonal

time and space" (585). Everything connects and interrelates in living, breathing patterns and rhythms that Albertine inhabits both physically and mentally.

Albertine's vision strikingly parallels one of Nanabozho, as described by the Chippewa writer Edward Benton-Banai:

As he rested in camp that night, Waynaboozhoo looked up into the sky and was overwhelmed at the beauty of the ahnung-ug (stars).^[3] They seemed to stretch away forever into the Ish-pi-ming (Universe). He became lost in the vast expanse of the stars. . . . Waynaboozhoo sensed a pulse, a rhythm in the Universe of stars. He felt his own o-day (heart) beating within himself. The beat of his heart and the beat of the Universe were the same. Waynaboozhoo gazed into the stars with joy. He drifted off to sleep listening to his heart and comforted by the feeling of oneness with the rhythm of the Universe. (56–57)

Like Albertine, Nanabozho in this story is lonely and confused. For both, the merging experience counteracts a sense of alienation and disconnectedness. Albertine's vision is powerful because it reestablishes her sense of connection to her home landscape, to her family (she holds Lipsha's arm and they float together), and, importantly, to Chippewa myth. Seeing the northern lights, Albertine imagines the sky as "a dance hall. And all the world's wandering souls were dancing there. I thought of June. She would be dancing if there were a dancehall in space" (LM 37). In Chippewa myth the joyful dancing of the dead in the afterworld creates the northern lights.^[4] Albertine's vision places June within a community in a "dancehall in space," and reestablishes her own links to her culture. By reinforcing her

transpersonal and mythic connections to her family, her community, and the natural universe, Albertine's physical merging into the cool, dark night intensifies her own sense of identity.

Albertine's single tricksterlike visionary experience is typical of Erdrich's technique; rather than assign a trickster identity to one particular character who has multiple trickster attributes, she emphasizes the trickster's multifaceted identity with an array of trickster characters. Nanabozho most clearly appears in Love Medicine in the magically flexible form of his namesake, Gerry Nanapush. As the novel's most conspicuous embodiment of the trickster, Gerry addresses Erdrich's central concerns by challenging the notion of fixed boundaries, both physically with his transformative powers and politically with his continual escapes from imprisonment by whites. Chippewa writer and critic Gerald Vizenor describes Nanabozho as a "comic healer and liberator" ("Trickster Discourse" 188). Gerry Nanapush fits both of these descriptions insofar as he represents Erdrich's concern with liberating and healing Chippewa culture from damaging white stereotypes. A thoroughly modern trickster, the two-hundred-and-fifty-pound Gerry squirms through prison walls and vanishes in thin air in Love Medicine , garnering his trickster reputation as a "famous politicking hero, dangerous armed criminal, judo expert, escape artist, charismatic member of the American Indian Movement, and smoker of many pipes of kinnikinnick in the most radical groups" (LM 341). Because it allows him to escape both literal and figurative confinement, the trickster's transformative power takes on political importance in Love Medicine .

Originally imprisoned because of a bar fight with a cowboy over a racial slur, Gerry ends up in jail because, as Albertine Johnson dryly observes,

White people are good witnesses to have on your side, because they have names, addresses, social security numbers, and work phones. But they are terrible witnesses to have against you, almost as bad as having Indians witness for you. Not only did Gerry's friends lack all forms of identification except their band cards, not only did they disappear (out of no malice but simply because Gerry was tried during powwow time), but the few he did manage to get were not interested in looking judge or jury in the eyes. . . . Gerry's friends, you see, had no confidence in the United States judicial system. (LM 201)

By placing her Nanabozho figure in such a conflict, Erdrich suggests the trickster's power to counteract and heal the wounds of racial injustice. Andrew Wiget points out that the ability to change form is an essential survival strategy against such restrictive forces: "Trickster is in the business of . . . insuring that man remains unfinished' by fossilized institutions, open and adaptable instead to changing contemporary realities' (21). Gerry keeps escaping, true to his proud slogan that "no concrete shitbarn prison's built that can hold a Chippewa" (LM 341). His face on protest buttons and the six o'clock news, he galvanizes the Chippewa community with his miraculous getaways, sailing out of three-story windows and flying up airshafts, which liberate him and by extension all Chippewas from the white world's effort to contain and define them.

The "unfinished" nature of the trickster provides an escape from essentializing definitions; however strong the mythic dimensions of Gerry's character, Erdrich carefully emphasizes his humanity as well. As Greg Sarris suggests, pinning a trickster identity onto Gerry would be just as confining as all of the

stereotypes from which he struggles to break free (130).^[5] With a deft sleight of hand, Erdrich shatters any static image of Gerry as trickster by showing the toll Gerry's public trickster role has taken as he awaits the birth of his daughter: "All the quickness and delicacy of his movements had disappeared, and he was only a poor tired fat man in those hours, a husband worried about his wife, menaced, tired of getting caught" (LM 168). Although he escapes from prison again in The Bingo Palace , his appearance in that novel makes over-romanticizing him impossible; physically diminished by years in a maximum security prison, Gerry's much-changed image on the television screen shocks his friend Albertine. Whereas the old Gerry "had absorbed and cushioned insults with a lopsided jolt of humor, . . . had been a man whose eyes lighted, who shed sparks," his gaze in a prison life documentary strikes her as hungry and desperate (BP 24–25). Erdrich's characterization of Gerry forces readers to consider both the mythic and the psychological dimensions of identity.^[6]

Given the fact that the trickster, as Vizenor explains, is a "teacher and healer in various personalities," Gerry's clownish, bumbling son, Lipsha, is clearly another of Love Medicine 's tricksters, deriving his healing "touch" from his mythical forebear ("People" 4). His uncle Lyman describes him as "a wild jack . . . clever and contriving as a fox," and, as a trickster in the youngest Chippewa generation, Lipsha represents the hope of cultural survival (LM 304). He goes on to become a central character in Erdrich's most recent novel The Bingo Palace (1994), in which he wavers (tricksterlike) between the luck and easy money of gambling and the fear that turning reservation lands into casino property will rob his community of its heritage and sense of identity.

In the title chapter of Love Medicine , Erdrich comically recasts the Nanabozho origin myth in the story of Lipsha's search for his parents.^[7] In the myth, when Nanabozho learns from his grandmother Nookomis that his mother had been stolen by a "powerful wind spirit" at his birth, he sets out on a long journey to find her and finally meets the great gambler, with whom he battles over the destiny of his people. At the tale's end, Nanabozho beats the gambler through trickery and returns to his people triumphant. The parallels to Love Medicine are clear. Like Nanabozho, Lipsha Morrissey first learns about his parents through his grandmother, Lulu Lamartine. Lipsha's mother, June, has also disappeared in a powerful wind (swept up in a North Dakota snowstorm), and after a search he finally meets his own trickster father, Gerry, and the traitorous King Kashpaw. The three gamble for King's car, and the father and son tricksters emerge victorious. Lipsha's repetition of Nanabozho's journey underscores the importance Erdrich places on cultural survival and suggests the danger betrayers like King pose to it. As with the Nanabozho myth, this poker game represents a struggle over the tribe's destiny, and by escaping from the police and winning King's car, Gerry and Lipsha outwit, if only for the moment, the internal and external forces that threaten to destroy the community. Erdrich's splitting of the trickster into two characters, the wandering Gerry and the homebound Lipsha, emphasizes the trickster's dual character as both marginal and central to the culture and underscores the trickster's multiple identity.^[8]

Although Gerry's mother, Lulu Lamartine, corresponds to Nanabozho's grandmother Nookomis, Lulu is also Erdrich's feminist revisioning of the trickster, sharing Nanabozho's physical

flexibility, artful gambling, and sexual prowess. Like the trickster, Lulu can "beat the devil himself at cards." She brags, "I am a woman of detachable parts" (LM 115). Always the center of gossip for transgressing societal rules, Lulu even breaks the incest taboo, pursuing and catching her distant cousin Moses Pillager in a union that produces her trickster son, Gerry. Like Gerry, Lulu has a history of escape from government institutions; as a child she repeatedly ran away from her government boarding school (LM 68). When she escapes the schools for good, thanks to the clever letters of her trickster grandfather, old man Nanapush, she revels in the thought that "they could not cage me anymore" (LM 69).

Though she does not narrate her own story until Love Medicine , Lulu provides a vital link between Love Medicine and Tracks as the listener to whom old man Nanapush's narration in Tracks is addressed. Through his stories, Nanapush counteracts the Indian boarding schools' attempts at cultural erasure and recreates a family and a tribal history for Lulu.^[9] Lulu's nine children speak for the ultimate success of Nanapush's message, for she almost single-handedly repopulates the reservation, knitting the tribe into one big family through their many fathers (Van Dyke 20). Erdrich emphasizes this familial interconnectedness in her description of "Lulu's boys": "Their gangling legs, encased alike in faded denim, shifted as if a ripple went through them collectively. . . . Clearly they were of one soul. Handsome, rangy, wildly various, they were bound in total loyalty, not by oath but by the simple, unquestioning belongingness of part of one organism" (LM 118). Fostered by their trickster mother, the boys present a picture of a potentially competitive and explosive system of interrelationships unified and strengthened by a sense of unquestioning belongingness.

A transformer, Lulu possesses the trickster's ability to dissolve her physical boundaries and merge with and absorb her environment: "I'd open my mouth wide, my ears wide, my heart, and I'd let everything inside" (LM 276). Lulu questions even the possibility of imposing boundaries, and as with Gerry, her trickster qualities lead her to deliver a political message: "All through my life I never did believe in human measurement," she explains, "numbers, time, inches, feet. All are just ploys for cutting nature down to size. I know the grand scheme of the world is beyond our brains to fathom, so I don't try, just let it in. . . . If we're going to measure land, let's measure right. Every foot and inch you're standing on . . . belongs to the Indians" (LM 282). Though her sexual escapades win her a trickster's lowly reputation, Lulu's political awareness makes her a guardian of the culture. She warns the tribal council of selling land to the government for a "tomahawk factory [that] mocked us all. . . . Indian against Indian, that's how the government's money offer made us act" (LM 284, 283). By the end of Love Medicine , Lulu emerges as an "old-time traditional," a cultural leader whose outrageous behavior in no way lessens her influence (LM 363).

Uninhibited by social constraints, free to dissolve boundaries and break taboos, the trickster's position on the edges of culture makes her or his perspective inherently revolutionary. As an "animate principle of disruption," the trickster questions rigid definitions and boundaries and challenges cultural assumptions (Wiget 86). By emphasizing her characters' trickster traits, Erdrich turns stereotypically negative images into sources of strength and survival. Using Gerry's trickster characteristics to turn the threatening image of an escaped federal criminal into a symbol of human vitality and possibility, Erdrich also, through

the resonance of the Nanabozho legend, transforms Lipsha's maladroit escape from home into a confirmation of personal and cultural identity, Finally, she makes us see Lulu not as the "heartless, shameless man-chaser" and "jabwa witch" that she is reputed to be, but as a woman of vibrancy and vision (LM 277, 322).

The oldest and most vocal of Erdrich's tricksters is old man Nanapush in Tracks , to whom Erdrich devotes over half of that novel's chapters. Nanapush has all the markings of a trickster: a joker, a healer, and a "clever gambler" who "satisfied three wives," he lives in a "tightly tamped box overlooking the crossroad" (T 38, 41, 4)^[10] Though of an earlier generation, Nanapush shares with Lulu and Gerry the circumstance of having escaped from confinement in a white world, and significantly, he associates this escape directly with being a trickster: "I had a Jesuit education in the halls of Saint John before Iran back to the woods and forgot all my prayers. My father said, 'Nanapush. That's what you'll be called. Because it's got to do with trickery and living in the bush'" (T 33). Erdrich's repetition of this pattern of indoctrination and escape indicates its importance as a trickster strategy for cultural survival.

Nanapush's tricksterlike skill as a mediator between worlds has led several critics to emphasize his adaptability.^[11] Certainly, survival depends upon adapting, yet in Erdrich's view adaptability can also lead to assimilation and even to a collapse of identity. Although Nanapush's knowledge of English makes him an authority within the tribe and a tribal representative to the government, his attitude toward his own bilingualism is deeply ambivalent. The trickster's transformational ability can only provide a useful model for identity when that fluid identity is firmly grounded in a sense of culture and place. For example, Nanapush's knowledge

of American laws and language enable him to "reach through the loophole" and bring Lulu home from the government school (T 225). Yet Nanapush regards his own knowledge of written English warily, because he knows that adaptation to modern, western ways can mean the loss of cultural identity. As he observes, "We were becoming . . . a tribe of file cabinets and triplicates, a tribe of single-space documents, directives, policy. A tribe of pressed trees. A tribe of chicken-scratch that can be scattered by a wind, diminished to ashes by one struck match" (T 225). Adaptation without connection to one's home and culture undermines identity and threatens the community, as we see in Lyman Lamartine. Lyman's description of his own fragile identity in Love Medicine ironically fulfills Nanapush's prediction in Tracks . "I could die now and leave no ripple. Why not! I considered, but then I came up with the fact that my death would leave a gap in the BIA records, my IRS account would be labeled incomplete until it closed. . . . In cabinets of files, anyway, I still maintained existence. The government knew me though the wind and the earth did not. I was alive, at least on paper" (300). Reborn "out of papers," Lyman skillfully works his way up in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and goes on to build the very tomahawk factory that his mother, Lulu, had named a threat to traditional culture (LM 303).

Vividly illustrating this danger of adapting too completely, one Chippewa trickster tale recounts:

One morning Winabojo got up early and went into the woods. He saw a great many men with clubs and asked what they were doing. They replied, "We are going to get the boy that your people wagered in the game; you had better join us

or you will be killed." Winabojo decided to do this in order to save his family. When they attacked the village he was so eager that he went right to his own lodge and began to kill his family. He killed the old people and the two boys and was about to kill the baby girl when someone stopped him. Then he was like someone waking from a dream and felt very sorry for what he had done. (Densmore 99)

Winabojo identifies so completely with his enemies that he kills his own family without realizing it, a vivid warning against internalized oppression.^[12] The destruction of Lyman's tomahawk factory brings about a similar result when Lyman notices Marie Kashpaw's hands have been mutilated in a machine designed to reproduce the work of "a hundred Chippewa grandmothers" (LM 310). Internalized racism sharply, if comically, colors Lyman's characterization of himself as "the flesh-and-blood proof of Nector Kashpaw's teepee-creeping" and his characterization of the activists in his community as "back-to-the-buffalo types" (LM 303).^[13] If such self-contempt and loss of identity is to be avoided, then the fluidity that allows the trickster to adapt to swiftly changing circumstances must spring from strong connections to community and culture.^[14]

One character so closely connected to the myths and old language of the traditional Chippewa that she remains at the margins of Erdrich's contemporary fictional world is Fleur Pillager, whose heroic fights to save her land, unconventional dress and behavior, and mythic connections make her a compelling female trickster figure. In addition to her pivotal role in Tracks , Fleur appears as an itinerant healer and powerful medicine woman in The Beet Queen , Love Medicine , and The Bingo Palace; she is the only

character to appear in all four novels. That Erdrich revised Love Medicine to include Fleur in her 1993 edition underscores Fleur's importance to the series, connecting the novels through her marginal but powerful presence. If Gerry and Nanapush are Erdrich's most traditional and widely recognized tricksters, Fleur represents Erdrich's most dramatic revision of the trickster. With Fleur, Erdrich not only retells traditional myths but, like Maxine Hong Kingston, reinvents and combines them. Fleur transgresses traditional myths, combining elements of the wolf (Nanabozho's brother), Misshepeshu the Water Monster, and the bear, making new combinations that are necessary for survival.^[15]

As Gerry does with Lipsha in Love Medicine , Fleur shares the trickster's role in Tracks with the verbose and socially central Nanapush, and like Gerry, Fleur never narrates. As Bonnie TuSmith notes, whereas Nanapush's trickster-outsider role is "sanctioned within the community" so that he "represents the communal voice" in the novel, Fleur escapes even the Chippewa community's attempts to define her, dressing like a man and living alone in spirit-inhabited woods (TuSmith, All My Relatives 131). Just as Gerry gains fame for his outlaw status, Fleur in an earlier time achieves an equally mythic reputation on the reservation and in nearby towns. "Power travels in the bloodlines," Pauline says, and although Fleur is not a blood relative of Nanapush, as his spiritual daughter she inherits his trickster traits along with the mystical powers of her own Pillager line (T 31). Unconventional as she is, Fleur displays traditional trickster behavior. She is sensual and skilled at cards and, like Nanapush, Lulu, and Gerry, Fleur encounters and escapes from a white world that attempts to define her too rigidly; she flees the small town of Argus after being raped by the three white men whom

she beats at poker once too often. Like Lipsha's card game with King at the end of Love Medicine , Fleur's poker game with the men at the butcher shop represents a battle over the future of the tribe. By winning enough money to make tax payments on her land, she saves herself and her family from starvation.

However, Fleur's tricksterlike pride and independence alone are not enough to work miracles. She must journey, Nanabozho-like, to the afterworld to gamble for her second child's life, and ultimately she fails to save her family's ancestral lands. As with Gerry, Erdrich uses Fleur's trickster traits to show the mythic possibilities of real human beings and to emphasize the importance of community to survival. Nanapush gives us a reason for Fleur's failure that illuminates Erdrich's regard for community: "Power dies." Nanapush warns, "As soon as you rely on the possession it is gone. Forget that it ever existed, and it returns. I never made the mistake of thinking that I owned my own strength, that was my secret. And so I was never alone in my failures" (T 177). Human mythic strength, Nanapush suggests, demands community.

Lonely Tricksters: The Beet Queen

As if to reinforce the importance of community to a viable trickster identity, Erdrich introduces an alternative version of the trickster "family" in The Beet Queen . Karl and Mary Adare share many trickster traits, and even their estranged baby brother, Jude Miller, has "clever hands" (BQ 315). Yet in sharp contrast to the three novels set on the Chippewa reservation, this novel, set in

the near by town of Argus and containing mostly white characters, emphasizes the fragility of a trickster identity when not grounded in community and tradition.

The Beet Queen is only loosely connected to the tetralogy's other three novels.^[16] Albertine's introduction of Dot Adare in Love Medicine foregrounds Erdrich's concern with community and cultural heritage: "On my left sat Gerry Nanapush of the Chippewa Tribe. On my right sat Dot Adare of the has-been, of the never-was, of the what's-in-front-of-me people" (LM 155). Dot is The Beet Queen 's title character, and the has-been never-was people to whom she belongs become the novel's central concern. If The Beet Queen pays tribute to Erdrich's German-American heritage and to her family's butcher shop, it also allows Erdrich to undercut the notion of any one family or community as "central" to her fictional world. Clearly, her focus on the Chippewa community in three novels speaks for the importance of Chippewa history and culture to her own art, but her departure from this locale in The Beet Queen deliberately decenters the tetralogy and allows her to explore other aspects of trickster identity. In The Beet Queen , Erdrich investigates what holds together identity, family, and community by repeatedly examining their collapse.

The Beet Queen opens with the explosion of a family, each fragment hurtling in a different direction. A single mother driven to desperation by debt and responsibility, Adelaide Adare flies off in a carnival plane in the novel's opening scene, abandoning her three children at an "Orphans' Picnic" (BQ 10). As the sun sets and the children realize their mother is not coming back, young Karl and Mary finally agree to let a stranger take their hungry baby brother home. They soon separate; Mary ends up in Argus searching for relatives, while Karl drifts aimlessly on railway boxcars.

Forced at a carnival (the trickster's realm) to face the chaos of having no ties, Karl and Mary struggle to define themselves with trickster strategies. Yet without a mythic structure such as the Nanabozho tradition on which to draw, their search is alienating and terrifying. Even among her relatives, Mary always feels an outsider, eventually finding solace in her fortune-telling tarot cards, Ouija boards, and yarrow sticks. Mary and Karl both embody the trickster's androgyny; at fourteen the bisexual Karl is mistaken for a girl, and Celestine James notes that "if you didn't know [Mary] was a woman you would never know it" (BQ 214). Mary's childhood is marked by one miraculous accident, when her headfirst dive down a playground slide into a sheet of ice produces a "miracle," the likeness of Christ.^[17] Mary significantly sees not Christ's but Karl's face in the ice, which suggests his role as a double Christ-Satan figure in the novel, a suggestion that is later reinforced by Jude's recognizing Karl as "the devil" (BQ 82). Karl maintains a tricksterlike position in the church, practicing a double life in the seminary: "between the lines of sacred texts, I rendezvoused with thin hard hoboes who had slept in the bushes" (BQ 55).

Karl stands out as The Beet Queen 's most clearly developed trickster, turning his total loss of family into a fragile trickster identity. Karl becomes the trickster-as-con-man in his series of traveling salesman jobs; he meets lover Wallace Pfef while selling air seeders at a crop and livestock convention and later moves in with Celestine after trying to sell her a set of cheap knives. His rootlessness comes from having been torn away from his roots as a child, and he uses the trickster's wanderer identity to avoid human contact. Faced with the possibility of a genuine connection with Wallace, he is haunted by a fear of again losing physical (and

psychological) reference to the world: "I suddenly had the feeling that had always frightened me, the blackness, the ground I'd stood on giving way, the falling no place" (BQ 106). His trickster identity—traveling light, no ties, no responsibility, no pain—relies on a lack of connections that leads eventually to his breakdown: "I made less and less sense too, until I made none at all. I was part of the senseless landscape. A pulse, a strip, of light. I give nothing, take nothing, mean nothing, hold nothing" (BQ 318).^[18] Karl's view of a "senseless landscape" contrasts sharply with the intense, historically grounded relationship to land evident in all of Erdrich's Chippewa novels. For the dispossessed, land becomes increasingly precious, but Karl remains oblivious to the landscape's history. In this novel, Erdrich shows the meaninglessness to which a lack of connection to culture and community leads. Despite Karl's collapse, Erdrich ends The Beet Queen on a note of hope; Karl returns to Argus looking for Dot and finds Wallace. He is still a trickster, "disreputable, unshaven, unwashed, . . . hungry," and Dot notices his car is "backed into its parking place, ready for a smooth exit"; yet for the moment, he has reestablished the links (BQ 321, 338).

From the initial collapse of a family, the novel continually balances on the edge of connection and isolation, convergence and dispersion.^[19] The characters are all "marginal" in a small midwestern town: Karl is bisexual, Wallace is homosexual, Celestine is part Native American, Sita is mentally ill, Mary is just unusual, and Dot is a social misfit. Together, they form "a complicated house" like that of the spider who makes its web in baby Dot's hair (BQ 204). Their links are tenuous, even hostile, clustered as they are around their possessive love for Dot. "More than anything we had in common, Dot's spite drove Celestine, Mary, and

me together," Wallace Pfef notes (BQ 301). In one of the novel's final scenes, Dot reenacts her grandmother Adelaide's flight at the fair as she boards the skywriter's plane. As the crowds leave the grandstand, Karl, Celestine, Mary, and Wallace remain: "They made a little group, flung out of nowhere, but together. They did not lower their eyes, but kept watching as above them Dot's name slowly spread, broke apart in air currents, and was sucked into the stratosphere, letter by letter" (BQ 328). This image captures both convergence (the little group flung together) and dispersion (Dot's name disappearing in air) and thus reflects the frailty and preciousness of human relationships. Unlike her grandmother, however, Dot returns and heads home with her mother—a final, powerful note of connection in a novel that repeatedly stresses loneliness and disconnection.

Evolving Community, Evolving Novels: The Trickster's Communal Voices

If the trickster exerts a slippery. indefinable, indefatigable presence in Erdrich's Chippewa novels, trickster energy also inspires the novels' forms. Alan Velie writes that "the only reservation that one might have in calling Love Medicine a trickster novel is that Gerry Nanapush is not really the central character" (122–123). Yet, paradoxically, it is Gerry's marginality that makes Love Medicine a trickster novel. Despite, or because of their multivocality, Erdrich's novels embody a trickster aesthetic. The decentered narrative structure of her novels challenges an ethnocentric worldview with its multiple perspectives, which emphasize community. recreate the novel as a social storytelling process, and draw in the

reader as one of the community of listeners. The issues of personal and cultural survival that Erdrich foregrounds with her emphasis on the trickster are inextricably connected to the process of communal storytelling that makes up the novels.

Love Medicine 's narrative structure fulfills the trickster's function to unsettle or critique our worldview, by forcing us to "pause 'between worlds' to discover the arbitrary structural principles of both" (Rainwater 407). Yet Erdrich's approach to multiple narrative does more than create a postmodern, jarring effect. Unlike many postmodern novels, Erdrich's narrative forms create a vivid sense of community.^[20] In Love Medicine , Tracks , and The Bingo Palace , Erdrich connects the literary techniques of multiple narrative to Native American oral traditions and, specifically, to oral storytelling techniques. Robert Silberman notes that Erdrich's work seems "at times to aspire to the status of 'pure' storytelling" in which, he explains, the literary text appears to be a direct transcription of a speaker addressing a particular listener (112).^[21] With its shifts between ten different perspectives, including six first-person narrators, Love Medicine expresses community. The various voices and perspectives that make up its chapters emphasize both friction and harmony and place each individual's narrative in the context of a collective, communal narrative.

The creation of community through multiple narrative is an inherently tricksterlike process. The trickster's multivalence and elusiveness suggest that although no one point of view is all- encompassing, all points of view, including those of the author, the narrators, the characters, and the reader or listener, together create the meaning of the story, and this emphasizes the importance of dialogue and community to the storytelling process. Gerald Vizenor sees the trickster's function in Native American oral tales

as "a consonance of narrative voices in discourse," an apt description for Love Medicine 's decentered, multivocal narrative structure ("Trickster Discourse" 193). The trickster, who dwells in and embodies the liminal, represents a site of intersection, dialogue, and connection even while eluding fixed definitions. The sometimes conflicting, sometimes coinciding narratives that form the chapters of Love Medicine create an implicit dialogue among the characters and a connection or an exchange within the narrative structure itself.

The reader of a trickster text like Love Medicine plays an integral part in the creation of meaning by sorting out and interpreting the various points of view, mapping the saga's various interconnected family trees, filling in gaps, and making the connections that none of the individual narrators make for us. Thus we can see the form of the book itself as healing, because in it the voices are united and, through the reading process, they appear to talk to each other.^[22] As Kathleen Sands observes, "The best works of American Indian fiction are never passive; they demand that we enter not only into the fictional world but participate actively in the process of storytelling" (24). This is especially true of trickster texts like Erdrich's. The trickster, Gerald Vizenor posits, "liberates the mind" as the active reader "implies the author, imagines narrative voices, inspires characters, and salutes tribal tricksters in a comic discourse" (Trickster of Liberty x). Erdrich duplicates an oral storytelling situation through her multivocal narrative form: the reader, as a "listener," creates the occasion for each narrator's performance and becomes not only a part of an imagined community of listeners but an active participant in the creation of that community. Sands describes the experience of reading Love Medicine in tricksterlike terms:

As marginal and edged, episodic and juxtaposed as this narrative is, it is not the characters or events of the novel that are dislocated and peripheral. Each is central to an element of the narrative. It is the reader who is placed at a distance, who is the observer on the fringes of the story, forced to shift position, turn, ponder, and finally integrate the story into a coherent whole by recognizing the indestructible connections between the characters and events of the narrative(s). Hence the novel places the reader in a paradoxically dual stance, simultaneously on the fringe of the story yet at the very center of the process. (12)

Like the trickster, the reader is constantly shifting positions, on the fringe and yet central to the creation of meaning.

A multiple narrative may be especially effective in works aimed at multiple audiences, including Chippewa, pan-tribal, and non-Native readers. As James Ruppert notes, through multiple narratives, contemporary Native American authors can "speak to all audiences at the same time and at different levels," forcing all readers to "acknowledge the multiplicity of realities around them" and to develop a "mythic imagination" (224). It is through an accretion of various versions of the story that characters like Gerry and Fleur emerge as magical, mythical, and yet psychologically realistic characters. That there exist not just numerous versions of reality but a multiplicity of realities becomes, as we shall see, even more important to the community-based narrative structure of Tracks .

Though Love Medicine and Tracks are both multivocal narratives, often switching perspectives between different narrators, the narrative forms of the two novels are also quite different. Whereas Love Medicine presents an almost dizzying array of

narrators and characters, Tracks presents the competing voices of just two narrators, the consummate trickster old man Nanapush and the unreliable, undesirable Pauline Puyat. The many voices of Erdrich's narratives complicate popular, oversimplified images of Native Americans and their history. The differences as well as the similarities in the narrative forms of Love Medicine and Tracks reflect Erdrich's conception of the history of a Chippewa community. If Love Medicine 's multivocality expresses the life of a contemporary reservation community, Tracks evokes an earlier moment of crisis in that same community history.

With its shifts between ten different perspectives, including six first-person narrators, Love Medicine 's narrative structure expresses a strong and vital community. The various voices and perspectives that make up its chapters emphasize both friction and harmony and place each individual's narrative in the context of a collective, communal narrative. Since Erdrich's narrative structure reflects the dynamics of the community, one might assume that the dual narration of Tracks indicates a more unified tribal past than the contemporary contentious atmosphere reflected in the many voices of Love Medicine .^[23] In fact, the narrators of Tracks are more openly hostile to each other's stories (each claiming the other lies) than are any of the narrators in Love Medicine , and their philosophical and social differences reflect a community in the grip of spiritual and political crisis.

Tracks chronicles the loss of reservation lands in the early twentieth century despite Fleur's and the others' heroic efforts to save it.^[24] Our last view of Fleur in Tracks carries her away from her family's land on a road that widens and flattens to "meet with government school, depots, stores, the plotted squares of farms" (T 224). Native American critic Gloria Bird accuses Tracks of reinforcing traditional stereotypes of the vanishing Indian and ac-

cuses Nanapush in particular of romanticism and nostalgia for the past. She quotes Nanapush's description of the passing of the old way of life:

I guided the last buffalo hunt. I saw the last bear shot. I trapped the last beaver with a pelt of more than two years' growth. I spoke aloud the words of the government treaty, and refused to sign the settlement papers that would take away our woods and lake. I axed the last birch that was older than I, and I saved the last Pillager. (T 2)

Bird acknowledges that the series of epidemics of which Nanapush tells us at the beginning of the novel is historically correct, but she claims that the emphasis on dying, together with the fact that Nanapush, Fleur, Moses and Pauline are all the "last" of their bloodlines, represents an internalization of oppression (41–42).

Though I agree that Erdrich calls upon and even emphasizes stereotypes in passages such as the one quoted above, I argue that she does so in order to rework them. Rather than reinforce stereotypes of the "Vanishing Red Man," Erdrich's trickster novels directly undercut those stereotypes, transforming a monologic tribal history into a multivocal cite of contention, connection, and possibility. Tracks begins with a history of lost loved ones and dwindling bloodlines, but it also chronicles the formation of new families. In a tricksterlike move of transformation, Tracks is an intervention in tribal history: it redefines notions of family and shows the survival tactics that enable the emergence of the strong community evident in Love Medicine . As Pauline says of the small band fighting to survive a long winter, "They formed a kind of

clan, the new made up of bits of the old" (T 70). Nanapush "adopts" Fleur by healing her and then adopts Lulu and passes on his name to her. Tracks revises not only Euro-American but also, as Pauline's comments suggest, traditional tribal definitions of kinship.^[25] Moreover, although Fleur's departure at the end of Tracks signals the dissolution of that new family, the dramatic situation of the novel itself gestures toward recovering connections: Nanapush tells his stories to Lulu, Fleur's daughter, who represents the future of the community. Fleur is indeed the "funnel" of tribal history; the one daughter she produces goes on in Love Medicine to repopulate the tribe and take her place as a community matriarch. Ironically, the other matriarch of Love Medicine , Marie Kashpaw, is the unacknowledged daughter of Tracks 's other narrator, Pauline. Taken together as the history of an evolving community, Tracks and Love Medicine express the stories not of vanishing relics but of intrepid survivors.

The differences in the narrative forms of Tracks and Love Medicine reflect the linguistic history of the Anishinabe, or Chippewa tribe. Though Erdrich's form derives in part from oral tradition, her novels also participate in a western literary tradition, with her narrators all speaking and writing in English. Love Medicine , which spans 1934 to 1984, reflects a time and a community in which nearly all of the characters have been educated in English-speaking schools. Conversely Tracks , which spans 1912 to 1924, reflects an earlier stage in the colonization of the Chippewa, when literacy was less common and the Anishinabe language was spoken more frequently. Their knowledge of English places both Nanapush and Pauline in the position of mediators between traditional ways and an encroaching white world. Erdrich's addition of many Anishinabe words to her revised 1993 edition of Love Medicine (the largest

editorial change to the text outside of the chapter additions) deepens the issue of language loss; the added chapter "Resurrection" deals extensively with Marie's political decision to turn to the old language because she's lost faith in English.

The narratives of Nanapush and Pauline represent two opposed responses to early twentieth-century Anglo education: Pauline's acceptance of the self-hatred and the confusion of internalized racism and Nanapush's trickster strategies of escape, transformation, and healing humor. Calling himself "a holdout" for the old ways, Nanapush "ran back to the woods" after his Jesuit education (T 33), and his wily, witty narratives attest to his faith and pride in Chippewa traditions (despite his constantly overstepping them). Pauline, in contrast, begs her father to send her to the "white town" because "I wanted to be like my grandfather, pure Canadian. That was because even as a child I saw that to hang back was to perish. I saw through the eyes of the world outside of us" (T 14). Pauline's increasing madness during the course of Tracks grows in large part from this internalized racism, which causes her to reject her Chippewa heritage in a futile grasp for acceptance in a world that scorns her. Susan Perez-Castillo notes that in Tracks "the reader shuttles between, not two different perceptions of reality, but two diametrically different realities; that of a people in the grip of disease, death, and spiritual despair, and that of a group of courageous and irreverent survivors (294). That Erdrich would choose to split Tracks 's narrative structure along these lines indicates the centrality of this conflict in Chippewa community history.

As a representation of two opposed realities, Tracks 's narrative structure replicates the myth of Chippewa trickster Nanabozho and the great gambler, which we have seen repeated over and over

in Erdrich's novels.^[26] The competing realities evident in Nanapush's and Pauline's narratives recast an ancient battle over the spirit of the tribe. In his bout with the gambler, the trickster "stopped evil for a moment in a game" (Vizenor, "People" 6). If Pauline's voice represents spiritual despair, then Nanapush's presence in the novel represents a tricksterlike comic challenge to that despair.^[27] Nanapush's description of Fleur's laughter at one of the novel's low points captures both the pain and the strength to bond that laughter can express: "rich, knowing, an invitation full of sadness and pleasure I could not help but join in" (T 214). According to Nanapush, Fleur is a powerful culture hero; Pauline, in contrast, views Fleur as a misguided throwback. Fleur's insistence on a world in which people would "know better" than to try to buy and sell spirit-filled Pillager land does indeed situate her in the past, but her own mythic strength enables her to reap revenge as she summons the wind to flatten the forest around her cabin, pinning the loggers and their horses (T 175).

That nearly all critics of Tracks treat the book as if Nanapush is the hero and the main character and that the book begins and ends with his voice, speaks strongly for Nanapush's success in the battle over the Chippewas' spirit. Nanapush wages his battles with stories.^[28] Nanapush muses, "Only looking back is there a pattern. . . . There is a story to it the way there is a story to all, never visible while it is happening. Only after, when an old man sits dreaming and talking in his chair, the design springs clear" (T 33–34.). Storytelling, by his definition, is analogous to history: both involve the ordering of experience from a retrospective vantage point. Pauline's tricksterlike comment that the story "comes up different every time, and has no ending, no beginning" re-

minds us that stories, and "objective" history itself, change with every telling and every teller (T 31).

Erdrich clearly values the changeability of narrative in her own storytelling process; she uses Pauline's description of storytelling in Tracks 's dedication to her husband-collaborator, Michael Dorris.^[29] She also connects her own storytelling to Native American and, specifically, Chippewa tradition and history, crediting Gerry Nanapush as trickster in Love Medicine as part of that storytelling tradition (Bonetti 90). Speaking of herself and her husband, who is a mixed-blood Navajo, Erdrich says, "When both of us look backward . . . we see and are devoted to telling about the lines of people that we see stretching back, breaking, surviving, somehow, somehow, and incredibly, culminating in somebody who can tell a story" (Bonetti 98).^[30] The link between storytelling and survival is vital for Erdrich: it is through the storytelling of her characters that she asserts the survival of Chippewa culture. Tracks 's consummate talker old man Nanapush survives by storytelling, which saves his life after consumption has wiped out his family: "I saved myself by starting a story," he says. "I got well by talking. Death could not get a word in edgewise, grew discouraged, and traveled on" (T 46). Later, when he nearly freezes and starves to death, "it was my own voice convinced me I was alive" (T 7). Like China Men 's Bak Goong, Nanapush recreates himself through words. By telling his story—to himself, to Lulu, and to the reader—he recreates his own history, builds a new community, and reconfirms an ongoing cultural tradition.

Erdrich's works embody the trickster's changeability: the stories contain contradictory and alternative truths; they go past their

boundaries as characters move from one book to another, interconnect, and converse with one another even between novels. We learn for instance in Tracks that, contrary to what Lulu tells us in Love Medicine , Fleur did not send her away as a punishment for playing near a dead body (T 218). Moreover, whereas Nanapush remembers Lulu's homecoming at the end of Tracks as his and Margaret's bracing together "like creaking oaks" to meet Lulu, in Love Medicine Lulu herself remembers it quite differently: "Nanapush was waiting for me at the crossroads. . . . When the haze cleared, I also noticed his wife, Margaret Kashpaw. She stood reluctant by his side. Staring at me, her eyes turned to blue-black metal. Her lips hardened, mean, and her face became a wedge of steel" (T 226; LM 69). Though Nanapush's memory reveals an idealized vision of his new "family," Lulu remains suspicious and embittered toward Margaret. Since Lulu is Nanapush's explicit audience in Tracks , her own description of the event in Love Medicine , told at a later date, clearly revises his.

The fluidity of the trickster's identity and the oral storytelling process naturally resists the fixity of the printed word. "Nanapush is a name that loses power every time that it is written and stored in a government file," Nanapush tells us.^[31] Perhaps the best example of Erdrich's effort to preserve the changeability of oral storytelling is the publication of her new edition of Love Medicine . The notion that even after its 1984 publication the novel remained "unfinished" and revisable destabilizes the assumption of the permanence of published text. The 1993 version, which adds four chapters and a large section to one earlier chapter, enhances many trickster aspects of the novel. The changes reinforce a sense of dialogue between Love Medicine and Tracks by weaving more connections between the two. Not only do we see Lulu's inter-

pretation of the ending of Tracks , but Fleur, Nanapush, Margaret, and Moses—all major characters of Tracks —make new appearances in the 1993 Love Medicine .^[32]

The new Love Medicine notably expands the stories of two important trickster characters, Lulu and her son Lyman. Lyman's increased presence establishes him firmly as one who forecasts the trickster's role in the future of the reservation community. Though his self-concept is weak, fashioned "out of papers," Lyman voices an alternative perspective on many of the cultural issues that the original Love Medicine introduces. Most important, he provides a counterpoint to Love Medicine 's other young trickster, Lipsha, and undercuts our previous impressions of characters we thought we knew, enabling us to see them in a more comical light.

Lyman's complete absorption of the values of American consumer culture informs his view of Lipsha: "Slouched in a corner chair away from the table, feet big in unlaced shoes shapeless as plaster, skinny otherwise, wearing a jean jacket cuffed too short for his knobby wrists, he looked puzzled. People treated him special, as though he were important somehow, but I couldn't see it (LM 304). Readers already familiar with Lipsha are likely to be startled by this frank dismissal of him according to common standards of dress and demeanor. Because Lyman has absorbed the dominant culture's values so completely, his observations force readers who share the values of American consumerism to critically reexamine their own perspectives and standards of judgment. Lyman deflates the stature of Love Medicine 's central figures and its central values of community and culture building. Yet acidic as his words are, Lyman continues to fulfill the trickster's function by keeping us on our toes, unsettling our comfortable

views of favorite characters and reminding us of yet another perspective within this Chippewa community.

Finally, just as Nanapush's stories told to Lulu serve as a pivotal link between Love Medicine and Tracks , Lyman's two narratives at the end of Love Medicine connect that novel to The Bingo Palace and suggest the future direction of the community. Through Lyman's vision of a vast bingo hall, which he builds in The Bingo Palace , Erdrich again associates trickster strategies to the history of a changing Chippewa community; casinos, a recent and growing phenomenon on Chippewa and many other Native American reservations, are the trickster's newest (and oldest) trick: "Gambling fit into the old traditions, chance was kind of an old-time thing. [Lyman] remembered watching people in a powwow tent, playing at the hand games, an old-time guessing event. Casino without electricity Just hands and songs and spells. . . . Jazz these hand games up with lights and clinkers and you put in shag carpet and you got a Chippewa casino" (LM 326–327). Though Erdrich's attitude toward the casinos is ambivalent (Lyman ominously predicts a future "based on greed and luck"), she emphasizes the subversive power of trickster strategies, as Lyman envisions a way to save himself and his community through smooth talk and tricks: "He'd . . . teach Chippewas the right ways, the proper ways, the polite ways, to take money from retired white people who had farmed Indian hunting grounds, worked Indian jobs, lived high while their neighbors lived low, looked down or never noticed who was starving, who was lost" (LM 327). Like Gerry's escapes from prison and Fleur's leveling the forest to pin the loggers, Lyman's plan to trick white farmers out of their money overturns the hierarchies. Yet again, as in the

great gambler myth, the trickster prevails "for a moment in a game" (Vizenor, "People" 6).

Chance and Design: The Bingo Palace

With its emphasis on strategy and luck, The Bingo Palace invokes the trickster more overtly than any other Erdrich novel and implies the trickster's centrality to contemporary community life. In The Bingo Palace , Erdrich plays with the possibilities of chance in narrative structure and community history, acting as trickster author in her orchestration of chance and design—from the characters' elaborate plans to the novel's own layout. The trickster's delight in "narrative chance" allows Erdrich to explore the future of a Chippewa community without containing or prescribing that future.^[33]

Unlike the dueling narrators of Tracks or the many-voiced narration in Love Medicine , the narrative perspective in The Bingo Palace poises between individual perception and a group consciousness that emerges as the voice of communal history. Lipsha Morrissey is the novel's predominant (and only first-person) narrator, though he narrates less than half of the novel's twenty-seven chapters and his point of view is interspersed with that of eight others, including an innovative chorus.^[34] Lipsha's "I" is balanced most notably by the choral "we," which narrates four chapters, including the book's opening and closing segments. Partly the voice of gossip, the chorus is a (momentarily) unified communal voice that seems to have absorbed the tetralogy's previous three novels: it remarks about Lipsha's failures that "we wish we could report back different since he last told his story" (BP 7). In

addition, the choral "we" implicitly links the chorus to the reader: "We don't know how it will work out, come to pass, which is why we watch so hard, all of us alike, one arguing voice. We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try" (BP 6). The chorus's watching is analogous to reading. We might in fact look at reading (or writing) stories as an extension of gossip, of that curiosity we all have in others' lives. By keeping the stories going, the chorus keeps the community alive with its "one arguing voice," a phrase that suggests both unity and multiplicity.

Lipsha's role as trickster in The Bingo Palace emerges directly in relation to the choral voice, which defines the community by describing everything Lipsha is not:

He was not a tribal council honcho, not a powwow organizer, not a medic in the cop's car in the parking lot. . . . He was not a member of a drum group, not a singer, not a candy-bar seller. Not a little old Cree lady with a scarf tied under her chin, a thin pocketbook in her lap, and a wax cup of coke, not one of us. He was not a fancy dancer with a mirror on his head and bobbing porcupine-hair roach, not a traditional. . . . He was not our grandfather, either, with the face like clean old-time chewed leather, who prayed over the microphone, head bowed. He was not even one of those gathered at the soda machines outside the doors, the ones who wouldn't go into the warm and grassy air because of being too drunk or too much in love or just bashful. He was not the Chippewa with rings pierced in her nose or the old aunt with water dripping through her fingers or the announcer with a ragged face and a drift of plumes on his indoor hat. (BP 9)

Like Morrison's Sula, Lipsha defines the community by his difference. As trickster, Lipsha fits nowhere in this community, yet his central narrative role suggests his importance to the community's future. As a narrative extension of Tracks and Love Medicine , The Bingo Palace 's mix of private and communal perspectives suggests a strong, vital, and unified (if arguing) community.

Lipsha shares his trickster role in The Bingo Palace with his uncle Lyman. The struggle between the two forms a pivotal tension in the book. As Lipsha remarks, their relationship, like his relationship to his heritage, cannot be sorted into separate strands of love and hate, jealousy and admiration. "Our history is a twisted rope and I hold on to it even as I saw against the knots" (BP 99). The novel's plot revolves around the two men and the one woman they both want, and a parallel struggle between preserving the land in traditional ways and selling out for a money-making casino project. Lyman is a classic trickster who always mixes his own selfishness with the good of the group: "a dark-minded schemer, a bitter yet shaman-pleasant entrepreneur who skipped money from behind the ears of uncle Sam, who joked to pull the wool down, who carved up this reservation the way his blood father Nector Kashpaw did, who had his own interest so mingled with his people's that he couldn't tell his personal ambition from the pride of the Kashpaws" (BP 5). As the tribe's leading entrepreneur, Lyman becomes a trickster creator whose plans can "bring the possibilities into existence" and generate badly needed revenue and jobs. Yet, sucked in by his own greed, he gambles away the tribe's loan money and his father's sacred pipe on his first night at a Las Vegas gaming convention, thereby threatening his community's future and traditions. As Nanabozho's struggle with the great gambler reminds

us, the trickster's gambles can mean life or death for the community.

Lipsha's awareness of a new crisis facing the Chippewas, the challenge posed by casino gambling, forces him to consider with whom the spiritual future of the tribe lies. Although he senses his own role as the community's next healer and cultural guardian after Fleur Pillager, Lipsha wonders to himself if Lyman might be a more appropriate choice as Fleur's descendant: "Fleur Pillager is a poker sharp, along with her other medicines. She wants a bigger catch, a fish that knows how to steal the bait, a clever operator who can use the luck that temporary loopholes in the law bring to Indians for higher causes, steady advances" (BP 221) Despite the novel's repeated insistence on the inconstancy and fluidity of money, a "clever operator" like Lyman may be just what the tribe needs. Lipsha explains that the sides of casino debate are not clear cut: "It's more or less a gray area of tense negotiations. It's not completely one way or another, tradition against the bingo. You have to stay alive to keep your tradition alive and working" (BP 221).^[35]

As in Tracks , the community's survival balances on a dispute over land, and again it is that land most sacred and vital to Chippewa traditions—Fleur's plot on the edge of Lake Matchimanito. "Everybody knows bingo money is not based on solid ground," Lipsha comments, yet despite its shiftiness, gambling is often a viable and necessary way of staying alive and maintaining ground (BP 221). After all, in Tracks Fleur earned enough money playing poker to temporarily save her land, and in The Bingo Palace we learn she has won back the land she lost at the end of Tracks in another poker game (BP 145). By the end of The Bingo Palace , any attempt at human control over land is clearly futile; Fleur's land

eventually goes to Lyman's development scheme. "Land is the only thing that lasts life to life," warns Nanapush in Tracks , an edict echoed by Fleur in The Bingo Palace (T 33 BP 148). The land itself becomes the ultimate trickster in The Bingo Palace , lasting life to life and resisting human efforts to contain, order, and divide it. Just as Shawnee Ray reminds Lyman and Lipsha that she is not theirs to argue over, the land itself reminds them that it cannot be owned but will always slip from their grasp. As the skunk says to Lipsha in a vision, "This ain't real estate" (BP 200). The land's permanence reminds us of human impermanence, and the frailty of our attempts to own the land. Lipsha muses,

Sky, field, and the signs of human attempts to alter same so small and unimportant and forgettable as you whiz by. . . . Passing shelter belts and fields that divide the world into squares, I always think of the chaos underneath. The signs and boundaries and markers on the surface are laid out strict, so recent that they make me remember how little time has passed since everything was high grass, taller than we stand, thicker, with no end. (BP 234)

Like the trickster's balance of chance and design, the land's underlying chaos and power is just barely contained under fragile, human-imposed structure.

The trickster's power lies in disruption of pattern, in an ability to negotiate between the known and the inchoate, reminding us that all human design is arbitrary. In The Bingo Palace , Erdrich constantly reiterates the interplay between chance and design, both in her characters' attempts to control their own lives and self-referentially in her own narrative structure. The novel is full of intricate plans, from Lulu's "small act" of sending Gerry's

picture to Lipsha, which hides a "complicated motive and a larger story" (3, to the "house of pulled strings" that Lipsha imagines Zelda constructing for those around her (14), to Shawnee Ray's elaborate patterns and designs fashioned to bring her independence. Yet although the thought of such human control is appealing, Erdrich emphasizes its drawbacks: in the grip of a heart attack Zelda realizes she has wasted her life, and Shawnee Ray nearly loses her son in her ambition to win a dance competition.

Far from advocating random chance and chaos, however, Erdrich acknowledges maneuverability among the forces of fate. Between chance and design, chaos and order, the trickster operates. From his solitary jail cell, trickster Gerry Nanapush voices the novel's central dynamic: "He knew from sitting in the still eye of chance that fate was not random. . . . Chance was patterns of a stranger complexity than we could name, but predictable. There was no such thing as a complete lack of order, only a design so vast it seemed unrepetitive up close, that is, until . . . one day, just maybe, you caught a wider glimpse" (BP 226). Granted an authorlike perspective on the plot of his own life, Gerry senses his participation in a larger design, a feeling reiterated by Lipsha: "I will always be the subject of a plan greater than myself" (BP 21).

Although the book suggests design, Erdrich does not enclose plot or characters within that design. Rather, the plot of The Bingo Palace permits and even insists on chance and uncertainty. The novel, and the tetralogy, ends not with closure but with possibility. With the most ambiguous ending of the four novels, The Bingo Palace never resolves whether it is right or wrong to build the casino; Shawnee Ray, for the moment, chooses neither Lipsha nor Lyman; Gerry has apparently raced off with June's ghost, as the snow erases natural landmarks and finally obliterates

boundaries between the living and the dead; Lipsha is left freezing to death (or not) with a baby in a stolen white car; and Fleur seems to have taken Lipsha's place on the road to death, and yet she "still walks," reminding others of her presence (BP 273). Fleur, as the tribe's history and its future, leaves her tracks on the snow, a gesture that links the saga's historically oldest and most recent books. Even after death, Fleur watches over the community from the lake: "We believe she follows our hands with her underwater eyes as we deal the cards on green baize, as we drown our past in love of chance, as our money collects, as we set fires and make personal wars over what to do with its weight, as we go forward into our own unsteady hopes" (BP 274). The novel ends in characteristic trickster fashion. Fleur's role as trickster at the end of The Bingo Palace reminds us of the uncontainability of her culture, of her history, and finally, of what the human mind can understand. Her bear's laugh can be heard on clear nights, but "no matter how we strain to decipher the sound it never quite makes sense, never relieves our certainty or our suspicion that there is more to be told, more than we know, more than can be caught in the sieve of our thinking" (BP 274). In The Bingo Palace , Fleur becomes the ghost in the machine, the fluid spirit, chance, chaos in the margins of our ordered minds that flashes out, in the novel's last words, "when we call our lives to question" (BP 274).

"The trickster's constant chatterings and antics remind us that life is endlessly narrative, prolific and openended," writes William Hynes, and Erdrich's trickster novels express just that ("Inconclusive Conclusions" 212). As Alan Velie reminds us, the trickster is "a figure created by the tribe as a whole, not an indi-

vidual author" (131), and consequently every trickster narrative revises or comments upon the ones that have come before it, as Lipsha's journey to discover his parentage recasts the Nanabozho origin myth. The trickster could not exist without the community: he or she lives and breathes through stories told and retold and embodies the vulnerabilities and the strengths of the culture. The many voices of Erdrich's novels create life, community, and history through storytelling and express contemporary history in all of its complexity. Central to that history, and inspiring the life of the community, of Chippewa culture, and of Erdrich's narratives, is the trickster. Like Fleur's bear laugh, Erdrich's novels leave us with the sense that there is "more to be told, more than we know, more than can be caught in the sieve of our thinking."