engleski

"Native American Tracks of the Fantastic."

The paper examines the relation between the fantastic and the (post)colonial character of Louise Erdrich's novel Tracks. Employing the fantastic through magical realism, the discourse of madness and the grotesque, Erdrich devised a polyphonic text that effectively questions and destabilizes the consistency of colonial symbols and identity constructs. This narrative technique is observable in the characterization of Pauline Puyat, one of the main protagonists and narrators in the novel, whose assimilation in the Western culture results in her complete renouncement and hatred of her indigenous heritage and identity. Yet, Pauline's identification with the dominant worldview, her obsession with Christianity and racial purity, manifests itself as mental illness and (self)destructive behavior that includes bizarre acts of penance, neglect of hygiene and a morbid wish to kill her unborn baby to save it from sin. Ironically, through her attempt to cleanse herself of her paganism, Pauline becomes spiritually, physically and morally the most unclean character in the novel. Mortifying and terrorizing her body to protect herself from the evils of nature and the temptations of instincts – sources of shame, corruption and barbarity, Pauline attests to the fact that the body is a construct "imprinted by history" and "disciplinary discursive practices" , the "‘text’ on which colonisation has written some of its most graphic and scrutable messages" . Yet, Pauline's rigid understanding of faith leads her not only to insanity but also to sin. In spite of her Christian creed and her sharp detachment from her heathen roots, she manifests occult tendencies and supernatural abilities that she regularly uses for evil purposes - to commit murder, adultery, deception, and various malicious acts. Possessed by magic and visions, she uses satanic methods to serve Christ's purpose, thus exhibiting the very traits that she claims to defy. Conflating Ojibwa and Judeo-Christian cosmologies by blurring the boundaries between the real, mythic, magical and supernatural, Erdrich exposes the inconsistency of Pauline's missionary pursuit, and highlights wickedness, selfishness, and immorality as its main features. Thereupon, using magical elements, she disturbs the coherence of the imperial dogma and its evangelical tools. This narrative effect concurs with Homi Bhabha's definition of hybridity – the reversal of "the effects of the colonialist disavowal, so that other 'denied' knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority - its rules of recognition" . Drawing upon Bhabha's hybridity theory and Mikhail Bakhtin's conceptualization of the grotesque, the analysis additionally juxtaposes the use of the fantastic in Erdrich's text to its commitment to epistemological translation, historical revisionism, cultural memory and emancipation.

Louise Erdrich; Tracks; fantastic; heteroglossia

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