Page 11 - GALIET BEING´S FLEUR: Eldrich IV

mutually challenging and sustaining relations” including Bak’s affirmation that “tongue-less-ness” in traditional Indian cultures represents a “sign of disempowerment” (Hughes 12), I will try to expose Fleur’s empowering liberty precisely because she is not “tongue-tied” to the complexities of a binary universe. Fleur belongs to tongue-less-ness and track-less-ness as much as Erdrich’s novel belongs to the “mytho-magical” world between “Little Spirit Sun and Wild Rice Sun.”
By focusing on the ambiguities and incoherences of the text, I propose to carefully decipher Fleur’s mysterious and complex track- less-ness in the same manner as one is to interpret poetry. I intend nothing less than to lift off the page those instances of “absences,” “exclusions,” “unthoughts” and “murmurs” and how their absences transplayintopresence. Toachievemyhermeneuticquest,Iwill juxtapose how Nanapush’s and Pauline’s different representations of Fleur have misled us through the distortions and failures of language (to represent what is) in relationship to Erdrich’s traces of Nanapush and Pauline.
Because Fleur seems so perplexingly absent, Nanapush and Pauline try, quite compellingly, to represent her nature, her essence to the best of their human, yet fallible intentions. Perhaps we ought to consider Walt Whitman’s wisdom written with the soul of his years in “When I Read the Book:”
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