Louise Erdrich's Plague of Doves

Doves, birds, and language associated with them, mark Louise Erdrich's new novel, A Plague of Doves. The function and meaning of the birds varies. An overarching meaning to the bird imagery eludes careful reading. Variously, they stand for spirit, fate, hope, truth. Stories and their function are a focus of this novel, and birds are likened to stories; Erdrich describes how a character is "too excited by the story beatings its wings inside of her, alive and insistent that morning for some reason, and she had to talk as we made our way along"(300).

Music also is a central feature, in particular a violin that appears and reappears throughout the book, and which at one point is "placed with great care...in it's velvet nest"(111). Bird's figure often and variously. Inevitably, they seem to stand for all things immaterial and spiritual: Truth, God, beauty, hope. And when these things get too close to earth, when people actually feel they've grasped and own them, they plague.



Similarly, the stories that make up the novel 'plague' or query the tellers, the citizens of present day Pluto, North Dakota and the surrounding reservation.

Despite the best efforts and wishes of those concerned in their truth and in telling them, thse never come to a satisfying closure or strong resolution, and are perpetually becoming new as their tellers pursue them, as others offer parts and retell them. They never settle; all their tellings and retellings aim for a truth, a centrality and finality, but they never gain it. Instead, to borrow an image from earlier in the book, they are like the doves early on who cover the roof of a rural church. "In play it seemed," bird after bird "flew up and knocked a bird off the holy cross that marked the cabin as a church, then took its place, only to be knocked off the crosspiece in turn."



Evelina Harp tells what might seem the pivotal or anchor story: the unjust lynching of four Native Americans for the gruesome murder of a farm family. Evelina doesn't so much tell it, as recount her beloved grandfather's telling of it. She is drawn to it by her beloved Grandfather's prominent role in it. She has a youthful desire to figure out the adult world and it's mysteries. More specifically, she's anxious to find the wrong and right, affix blame and guilt, and label the good and the bad people. Without being quite conscious of it, she is looking for justice. She is "obsessed with lineage," but far from able to draw lines that will clearly distance her and her loved ones from responsibility for evils in the past. In trying to trace out a chart with lines connecting the perpetrators and victims of injustice in the past and herself the folks who surround her in the present, she writes in pencil, finds parts "so complicated that [she]erased parts...until I wore right through the paper," and discovers she "could not erase the questions underneath, and Mooshum was no help."



This tale of racial hatred is knocked off the cross by a tale of racial brotherhood of sorts. It belongs to Judge Antone Coutts. Again, though, like Evelina, he's not telling the tale so much as relaying his Grandfather's account of his first foray into the Dakota's with a land-staking company. In this story, the 'white' men, ancestors of many now living in proximity to each other in Pluto and the surrounding reservation, are saved time and time again by their native American trackers. However, it is never clear that brotherhood comes about between the parties as much as a thoughtless tolerance compelled by necessity. Moreover, whatever brotherhood is brought about comes to the fore only in the face of what would seem a rather capricious and hostile natural world.



It is the central story. The other stories branch out from or (in the case of a settler's story that preceeds it in time) flow into it. However, while the other stories in the book connect to it, and while the ancestors and the descendents of the participants in the lynching figure in the other stories, other connection between the central story and the other stories is open to question. They neither explain the central tale nor can be accounted for by it.



Yet another fact seems to always be added to the story. Most novels are grounded or centered by one story with other, ancillary stories clearly connected to it. Erdrich's book is focused on a central tale, the lynching of four native Americans in North Dakota in 1911.



However, while the novel focuses on this tale and it's reprecussions, she hedges it's centrality. Moreover, it is forever being retold and reread. Her characters continually contest its facts and it's meaning. By granting a respectful space for all these readings, the force shape of tales impact, it's "Truth" becomes confused. Erdrich questions the way novels and stories ground or prioritize stories. For Erdrich, there is not always another version of a story, but there is always a story that comes before the founding story. And, there is always a tributary to that founding tale confusing our reading of it's issue and meaning.