Page 9 - GALIET BEING´S FLEUR: Eldrich IV

What dwelling dwells in Fleur Pillager’s visible silence is all that is, all that exists between breath and unbreath, all that is inspirited and inspired: “fleurs.” And what dwells in Pauline Puyat’s narrative is nothing but the concoctions of narrative breath: the naming, rewriting and reinterpreting of her identity, including that of others, through the laborious obstacles of her crafty pen. And then Nanapush: infinitely ancient and wise, a master storyteller and sole survivor of his clan, whose endearing voice, in exhaling the journeys of the many fallings of snow, tries to breathe life back and reawaken the identity and traditions of his dying tribal community: the Anishinabe.
In Louise Erdrich’s Tracks we witness the fragility, futility and struggle of oral and narrative discourses. Both, Nanapush and Pauline, by being agents of the vicissitudes of oral and narrative discourses respectively, represent a vivid clash between the Anishinabe and Christian cultures. Their magic-realist confabulations serve to overwrite, discount and compete against each other’s claims with indefatigable pertinacity. Fleur, however, by lacking her own discourse, is beyond the incongruities of language and representation: she neither seeks to define, nor construct, nor “personify” herself, either orally or narratively, for she is the magic dweller of the invisible, the unnamed and the unreal. In fact, Fleur enchants us with her arcane dance, miles away from the lighting bolts of language and its all-too-fallible systems and structures. Thus, Fleur, like a pale wave, lashes at us with an inarticulate freshness and
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