Page 15 - GALIET BEING´S FLEUR: Eldrich IV
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represented world. Further, Nanapush equates “unstories” with track-less-ness, rawness and death. Yet Fleur’s track-less-ness and rawness need not be viewed negatively. Her raw power is what transcends reality and although Nanapush interprets her, a la Whitman, as “containing multitudes,” hers is a dwelling in the multitudes of presence or what we could label as a “forgetting.” In contrast, it is Nanapush who drowns in his rivers of longing, in the obliviscible tracks of ancestry and memories “An old man had some relatives, got a chance to pass his name on...Nanapush is a name that loses power every time that it is written...” (Erdrich 32). His identity is as communal as Fleur’s is individual. Therefore, Nanapush and Fleur represent Remembering versus Forgetting.
Could Nanapush, then not be, implicitly, misinterpreting Fleur’s actions imposed by his own limitations and lack of understanding of the “Other?” Is he not, in an imperceptible way, trying to manipulate and violate Fleur’s desperate and indefatigable yearnings for that “Other,” that unequaled beauty of silence, that sacred need for absence, for individuality, for al.one.ness paralleled perhaps to the vastness of Midsummer Night’s Dreams “enchanting forest” so indispensable for “being?” Could I, equally, because of the subjectivity of words, be misinterpreting Nanapush’s binary macrocosm, for in community we can appreciate our individuality, in multitude our solitude, in sonance our silence, in time our time-less- ness, in tongue our tongue-less-ness? Or is it Fleur’s reason of being, her “razón de ser,” to expand beyond those banal binaries (whose
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