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The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse: The Space Between

"There are no gray areas in my philosophy," said Father Jude.

"I have never seen the truth," said Damien, without crossing my eyes. Life is crazy."

"Our job is to make it less so."

"Our job is to understand it." (135)

            In The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, Louise Erdrich raises many important questions about being an American during the postmodern moment.  Among the most significant of these questions is, How can I relate to my fellow beings and myself in an ethical way? In a land that is being taken over by colonialism, an outsider in the midst of a dying culture, Agnes DeWitt faces this question and answers it through stories about her life.  These stories reveal that the way to live ethically in the postmodern world is by embracing all narratives and existing in the space between them.        

            When she takes on the form of Father Damien Modeste, Agnes enters a disappearing world.  The Ojibwe reservation of Little No Horse is being taken apart piece by piece as the land is sold by the desperate people who Sister Hildegarde says, cannot read the documents they sign (72).  The breakdown is not only physical, but spiritual as well, as the Catholic missionaries sent there have devoted their time to converting the Ojibwe people from their native religious practices in ways that are sometimes overly zealous.  You must go visiting with the sacrament, Sister Hildegarde urges. The poor Indians are dying out.  Now is a good time to convert them!They just sit patiently, singing, drumming, and prepare to get sick.  You could easily baptize them while theyre tranced (71).  Agnes response is to ignore this suggestion and go on to ask about how the sickness can be treated; she is more interested in saving their lives than in claiming their souls. 

            This response signifies a driving force in Agnes/Father Damiens character.  As a Catholic priest on a mission to the reservation, his main role is assumed to be that of a colonizer.  He is expected to convert the wretches to Christianity and turn them from their heathen ways.  Agnes has very different expectations for what her role will be. I am sent hereto accept and to absorb.  I shall be a thick cloth (74).  True to her vow, she does accept and absorb, much to the surprise of the Ojibwe people and her colleagues.  She does baptize those who volunteer to become Catholics, but sees no conflict in the continuation of their former religious practices, and even becomes involved in them herself.  While others are dismissive of these rituals (It is easy to mystify children, says Sister Hildegarde) Father Damien takes them seriously.  When suffering through a bout of incurable insomnia, he first tries every remedy available to him in the mission.  The white American medicinal cures are ineffectual.  He finally admits his exhaustion to Nanapush, who takes care of him by putting up a sweat lodge.  Father Damiens experience inside the hut is one of curious observation, leading to unexpected comfort:

Once Nanapush started to pray, addressing the creator of all things and all beings to every direction and every animal, Agnes knew that [] this was indeed her friends true church, which held him close upon the earth and intimate with fire, with water, with the heated air that cleaned their lungs, with the earth below them, and with the eagles nest of the sweat lodge over them [] Agnes surrendered.  According to church doctrine, it was wrong for a priest to undertake Gods worship in so alien a place.  Was it more wrong, yet, to feel suddenly at peace? (215)

Although she could not even fully understand all of the words of the prayers, she surrendered to them, opening herself to the faith of her friends, and the result was a cure for her insomnia:  Not weariness or exhaustion, those things Father Damien strove toward in his work to try to outwit the grip of insomnia, but the luxuriant stretching of an utterly relaxed spirit (215). 

            By opening herself to a form of spirituality foreign to her own experience and by not assuming to own or control it, Agnes is able to deal ethically with people whom, according to her traditional role, she should have been converting and colonizing.  The result is a higher spiritual awareness than she had known before.  Father Damien baptizes, while at the same time allowing himself to be converted.  His bedrock now was aggregate.  The voices that spoke to him arose sometimes out of wind and at other times from the pages of religious books (266).  By seeking a holistic existence rather than an exclusionary one, Father Damien combines the truths he has known to construct a more complete spirituality.  It was apparent, to the people, that the priest was in the service of the spirit of goodness, wherever that might evidence itself (276).

            A symbol of Father Damiens acceptance of Ojibwe spirituality is his desire and  willingness to learn the language and incorporate it into himself.  As in his delirium of insomnia, He was exploring worlds inhabited by both Ojibwe and Catholic (211).  Agnes prays for knowledge of the language four times a day. She asked for answers, and for the spirit of the language to enter her heart (182).  The language influences her prayers, the way she prays, and therefore her spiritual center.  She preferred the Ojibwe word for praying, anamaay, with its sense of a great motion upward.  She began to address the trinity as four and to include the spirit of each direction (182).  In prayer she is her true self, with no thought or expectation (182).  It is by stepping outside of herself and embracing the Ojibwe language that she is able to experience, the vast comfort of a God who comforted her in a language other than her own (216).  Language is a channel she uses to tap into this new level of existence.

            Another way Agnes embraces multiple narratvies is by existing as both male and female simultaneously.  This is perhaps even more extraordinary than overcoming racial or religious boundaries, because gender constructions are even more engrained and enforced in twentieth century American culture.  Moreover, it is clear in the narrative that this sex change is not motivated by lesbianism or sexual desire; it is simply the ethical desire of taking on the persona of the Other. 

            Agnes starts out a nun, cloistered away in a convent, and ends up a priest, out in a brutal world, open to all its violence and passion.  This range of experience allows her to interact meaningfully with both men and women.  She realizes that definitions of male and female are inadequate to describe someones true being.  Between these two, where was the real self? It came to her that both Sister Cecilia and then Agnes were as heavily manufactured of gesture and pose as was Father Damien.  And within this, what sifting of identity was she? What mote? What nothing? (76) As she becomes Father Damien, she experiences a pang, a loss, an eerie rocking between genders (78).  She must give up parts of her former self to create her new self as Father Damien.  However, it is important to note that she never completely leaves Agnes behind.  Even as she walks like a man, lowers her voice, and performs rites with authority, there were gestures left over from the convent, and also from her life as a woman in love (76).  Although they are temporarily absent, her skills as a pianist return, her lover Chopin returns, and she even has a sexual liaison as a woman at the height of her existence as a man.  And then there is the most obvious indicator; the narrator never stops referring to her as Agnes and interchangeably refers to her as he and she.

This "rocking between genders" allows her the freedom to exist fully as a human being in a way others cannot.  On one side, Agnes represents the female characteristics of charity, compassion, weakness, maternal tendencies, nurturing.  As a male, Father Damien is respected, has authority in the hierarchy, chastises, absolves and instructs.  But this binary is false.  Erdrichs method of constantly shifting between the two personas indicates that the lines are blurred.  When [Father Damien] saw Fleurs newborn baby something happened to him or to Agnes, what did it matter? (183) In reality, Father Damien is neither feminine nor masculine; Agnes is simultaneously a man and a woman.  The two personas are not separate and distinct, but integrated and responsive parts of a complete whole.  Because of this wholeness of self, Father Damien is able to touch lives and be touched in a myriad of ways by both men and women.  Even those close to him who discover that he is a woman (Nanapush, Mary Kashpaw) continue to treat him with loyalty and behave as if it makes no difference to them what gender he happens to be.  Ironically, even though living between genders requires him to deceive all those he comes in contact with, the lies he tells are more honest than the truth.   

            In addition to experiencing life as both male and female, Agnes story blurs the line between the sensual and the spiritual.  In an interview, Louise Erdrich comments on this.  I believe that faith is erotic in the sense that our yearning is toward union, toward the absoluteI interpret erotic to be a much more inclusive and embracing word than, say, purely sexual (Bookbrowse, 1).  This intermingling of the spiritual and the erotic is introduced in the novel the first time we see Agnes as a young woman, when she appears on Berndts doorstep.  He thought at first she must be a loose woman, fleeing a brothelHe didnt know she was from God (13).  There is an earthiness about her that convinces Berndt that she must be a prostitute, when in fact, she is a nun, the farthest thing from a prostitute a woman could possibly be.  It is in her life as a nun that she is introduced to the sensual through the music of Chopin.  As she plays the piano, she feels the music so deeply that it is a sexual experience to her, one that is mirrored in the rest of the novel and becomes paralleled in her spiritual experiences.  In fact, at times Chopin takes the place of Christ in her devotion. For Agnes [God] seemed to have no time.  She prayed.  He did not answer.  Chopin was more reliable (38). 

            The account of Agnes rescue from the flood is another example of the mixing of the spiritual and the sensual.  She is cared for by a man whom she later identifies as Christ himself. 

[] she was naked in the bed [] The sheepskin dropped away from her body, and she felt the slight breeze of his breath along her throat.  He stroked her hair, smiled at her.  She felt warmth along her thighs, hovering elation.  Bands of rippling lightness engulfed her when he moved closer (42-43). 

Needless to say, these images are not the ones normally associated with an experience with the divine.  While some might consider these associations sacrilegious, they are crucial to Agnes understanding of Christ; after all, as a nun she considered herself to be his bride.  For of course she knew her husband long before she met Him, long before He rescued her, long before He fed her broth and held Agnes close to Him all through that quiet night (43). 

            However central they are to her faith, though, the sensual aspects of spirituality also lead Agnes to much questioning and doubt, as occurs in her affair with Gregory Wekkle.  Gregory knew himself and knew his love for Agnes was a good love [] he tortured himself in his prayers to find evil in his actions, but knew only harmony and righteous peace.  Nothing, none of this fit doctrine (204).  Agnes religiosity tells her that extramarital sex is a mortal sin, but she cant bring herself to honestly feel bad about what they are doing.  Her desire was one with a kind regard that felt both sinless and irresistible (204).  As Gregory says, If we are cut off from God by sinning [] why do I feel so close to God when I touch you in this darkness, in this cloud? (205)  This questioning places Agnes again between two worlds, this time the worlds of doubt and faith.

            In her experiences on the reservation, Agnes comes to see inconsistency in the faith of her youth.  Her observations raise questions that she carries with her constantly.  What is true piety? Where is the line between wrong and right? Between truth and lies? Lust and love? God and the devil? When her musical talent is restored, she asks herself, Had the devil in its original tempters form returned her art, or had God? And furthermore, what did it matter? (221) After Gregory leaves, she even questions Gods existence.  Have I invented my God? Is God my yearning? Is my yearning God? (207) The questions are often angry, passionate, pleading.  Talk to me! Talk to me! She angrily prayed to the Christ whod saved her from the river [] she dreaded genuflecting before the crucifix a stamped piece of brass, two strips of tin, and the suffering Christ, a contorted lie (208).

            Paradoxically, these struggles with doubt do not kill her faith; they make it stronger.  She is able to see the ugliness of faith along with the beauty, as with the statue of Mary (226) and as shown in the sermon to the snakes.  But, my friends, what is love here? How to define it? [] is Gods love, perhaps, something very different from what we think we know? (227) When she finally realizes that her faith cannot be defined or pinned down, then and only then is it whole and complete. 

This idea is the very essence of postmodernism.  It is a true story, then, that stands the test of deconstruction, above all, that of undecidability (McKenna 135).  Just as a true story will withstand deconstruction, true faith will survive doubt.  Father Jude comes to realize this when he sees that Father Damien has lived a life of love, and wonders, Was doubt coupled with devotion a greater virtue than simple faith? [] the more he learned, the more he thought, the less certainty he grasped (239).  Only by letting go of his certainty can he reconcile the narratives he is hearing. 

            Perhaps the most difficult ambiguity Agnes lives with is the space between damnation and redemption.  As a Catholic priest, her main concern is one of saving souls,  of admonishing, absolving and administering to them.  The more she grows in her new undefined spirituality, the less certain she is about the meaning and importance of redemption.  Her mission to the Indians begins as a quest to live as Christ lived.  I should attend him as a loving woman follows her soldier into the battle of life, dressed as He is dressed, suffering the same hardships (44).  The focus of her faith expands from a trust in Christ to include a belief in the spirits of the Ojibwe, where redemption is not as easily defined.  For the countries of the spirit, to which he was now admitted, were accessible only via many dim and tangled trails.  For this reason, he tells Father Jude that he does not believe conversion brings about redemption.  It is no longer that simple; faith cannot be defined so easily.  During her affair with Gregory, Agnes asks the morbid question, How many ways are we damned? The words are empty in the face of what she now knows to be true.  The rules she learned as a child have no application in her new life on the reservation.

            It is this willingness to let go of the boundaries, to step into nothingness that characterizes Agnes faith.  This is what allows her to exist in wholeness and to be an ethical carrier of the stories she has witnessed.  The meaning of Agnes name is appropriate: lamb, the Christian symbol of sacrifice and peace.  She brings peace, because she lives a life of sacrifice, ambiguity and uncertainty. Our souls are freed, Agnes thinks, the only problem was that freedom was an open and a lonely space.   Instead of colonizing, defining and leaving her imprint on those with whom she has contact, she accepts and absorbs all narratives, experiencing them on their own terms and resulting in relationships that continue to guide her beyond the grave.  Her power lies in her willingness to live in many worlds, to exist in the space between.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

A Conversation with Louise Erdrich. Bookbrowse.com  2001.  Bookbrowse. 

            7 August 2002 < http://www.bookbrowse.com/index.cfm?page= author&                    

            authorID=613&view=interview>.

Erdrich, Louise.  The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse.  New York:  Harper

            Collins, 2001.

McKenna, Andrew J.  Violence and Difference: Girard, Derrida, and Deconstruction. 

Chicago:  University of Illinois, 1992.