Four Souls

So, I’ve been reading. You know, like I do. Quartermain’s book on disjunctive poetics is fantastic, but not a page turner. For page turning, recently Carl Hiassan’s Double Whammy, which is a good noir novel, and thankfully not trying to be darkly hilarious in the way that Sick Puppy is. Read DW on the plane back from NY (about which a post is coming). But, then I got home to no TV and no NY to keep me out of myself for those lost moments when rest is what one wants. Answer? Erdrich’s Four Souls, of which several moments resonated with me. …

Overall, the plot’s arc, the complications of relationships, the way revenge is as intimate as love in this novel is important. Hate, jealousy, fear, these things are forms of intimacy, but they are its dark side. One lesson in the novel is that life’s ambiguity is stronger than we are most of the time. The balancing force, the quality that gives us poise in the ambiguity, is having a strong sense of one’s spirit, one’s true name. – Now, in the world of the novel and Ojibwe people who populate it, this “theme” has very specific expression in terms of their culture, and that lesson, about “the other” is just as important. And a post for another time. One about how teaching in the humanities can teach us what Murdoch called unselfing, and what Irigaray calls self-questioning for the sake of the other, and what Keats called negative capability, but all that IS for another time. Since it has to do with saying that if lovers knew each other in love as well as enemies know each other in enmity, then love would have a better chance. But, I’m thinking tonight in aesthetics, in harmonies with something in me.

Warning! Spoilers to follow. …


In the opening of the novel, Fleur is on a journey. Her journey has a purpose: revenge. I adore the ice solid hate in this line: “She wanted the man healthy so she could destroy him fresh” (24). There is a fierceness and dryness in this sentence that puts one completely in fear of Fleur.

In another mood: Polly Elizabeth has the most loving epiphany in the story. It hits with, “Fleur is my sister now. … I think I’ll cast my lot with her” (129). This from a white woman who began suspicious, and then turned hateful toward Fleur for some time. But, it gets better. The event that lead to this was an outing of the two women John, Jr. They encounter a socially awkward situation, and Fleur and Polly defend each other. The latter with the right turn of phrase, and the earlier with her physical imposition. Polly’s had a relatively loveless life and learns: “My self-pity about my failure in love was erased. The absurd triumphed. I had a true connection, something quite beyond the pale of words. If one accepts, I thought late, as drowsily swayed home on the streetcar. If one only accepts what is given! There could be afternoons of laughter. There could even be happiness! (125). --- Now, it is a case of two uneasy allies against a clear enemy that creates this bond, but the bond can’t be there unless the two allies agree to deepen it. And Polly is accepting the moment, the situation for-now, and that opens everything for her. --- Why preach the epiphany of acceptance? Me, who is so busy refusing one for-now in favor of something-else? Because Polly had to accept where the love would come from, not her idea of it. And I have to accept the challenge of my life, not some external idea of it. In both cases, she and I are taking our situations into our hands. As you will see when you see the decisions Polly makes, and the huge changes in her life that follow and make her happy.

Then there’s the washing scene with Margaret and Fleur. Not to spoil too much, I’ll leave it out. But here’s the thing in it that broke my eyes into tears: the tenderness, the deep, hard love offered to someone who so rarely could accept the gentle kind of love. Fleur has to get right with her spirit, and that is always a long, arduous, sometimes life risking task, but Margaret decides to love her into and through that process no matter who comes out the other side. It is this, Class, that breaks me in this world, every time: act of love that come from the marrow. Because they are the best of the sublime, because they are human, because they are more powerful than any darkness or love of death. Because in our enmities, which we love so well, we make so little of it.