Considerable attention has been devoted to the varied genres and forms that Erdrich employs in Love Medicine, and how they interact with each other.[14][15][5][16] Kathleen Sands describes Love Medicine as a metafictional novel that consists of “hard edges, multiple voices, disjointed episodes, erratic tone shifts […] incomplete memories” that are spliced together in a self-reflexive manner. According to Sands, the novel is concerned as much with the process of storytelling as with the story itself.[14] Hertha D. Sweet Wong, on the other hand, questions whether Love Medicine can be considered a novel at all. Instead, Wong quotes Robert Luscher’s definition of “the short story sequence”: “a volume of stories, collected and organized by their author, in which the reader successively realizes underlying patterns of coherence.”[15] Yet, Wong argues, even that definition fails to adequately capture the inherent nonlinearity of Native American narratives, which are often multivocal and achronological. Consequently, Wong arrives at a description of Love Medicine as a “web” of short stories that is “informed by both modernist literary strategies (for instance, multiple narrative voices) and oral traditions(such as a storyteller’s use or repetition, recurrent development, and associational structure).”[15]
Oral form
Hertha D. Sweet Wong points to Erdrich's simulation of Indigenous oral forms in her short story "webs" as a key narrative innovation.[15] Wong argues that the egalitarian pluralism that is embedded in Native American oral traditions offers new artistic possibilities for writers of multivocal narratives; what was experienced, under conventional post-modern explanations, as an alienation from both self and society, and the indeterminacy of language, can now be reimagined as a vivacious expression multivocal unity.[15]
Kathleen Sands further refines critical understanding of the oral form in Love Medicine as a competition between personal narratives: no one voice demonstrates a privileged relationship with the truth, and readers can only catch a glimpse of the real story by “puzzling right along with them [the personal narratives] to the end.”[17] Sands writes, “the source of her [Erdrich’s] story telling technique is the secular anecdotal narrative process of community gossip, the storytelling sanction toward proper behavior that works so effectively in Indian communities to identify membership in the group and ensure survival of group values and its valued individuals […] Gossip affirms identity, provides information, and binds the absent to the family and the community.”[17]
On a contrasting note, citing a bias towards culturalism in the textual critiques of Hertha Sweet Wong and Paula Gunn Allen, Ojibwe writer and literary critic David Treuer cautions against imposing unqualified notions of Native American "polyvocality" and narrative egalitarianism on the text of Love Medicine.[5] Treuer argues that the what readers experience as "polyvocality" is actually a proliferation of personal symbols, and that on the level of language, all the narrators of Love Medicine, in fact, inhabit the same consciousness. Treuer points to a tension between the "language of event," marked by stark naturalism, and the "language of thought," marked by rich symbolism and metaphors, and how all the chapters of Love Medicine "use a mixture of fact and fancy, a mixture of the figure and the figurative, to create its tensions and to resolve them."[5] Thus, according to Treuer, Love Medicine is a product of literary techniques that derive predominantly from Western Fiction. Examining the opening chapter of Love Medicine, Treuer notes that beyond surface similarities, there is little that ties the text to well known Ojibwe Wenabozaho narratives. Treuer takes pain to note that he is not advocating for an understanding of Love Medicine that is devoid of Indigenous cultural context; to the contrary, Treuer argues, Erdrich's genius is in summoning an "idea of [Ojibwe] culture," and expressing Indigenous yearning for such culture, in a literary environment that is not its own.[5]
Genres and literary traditions
For Helen Jaskoski, the “Saint Marie” chapter is notable for its reflexive use of Ojibwe Windigo stories to subvert a complex of European romance and fairytale allusions.[16] An embodiment of winter starvation, the Windigo can take possession of human souls and cause cannibalistic cravings.[16] In many stories the “Windigo meets defeat at the hands of a child […] who must become the Windigo herself in order to defeat the monster.”[16] Jaskoski points to several passages of “Saint Marie” where Marie demonstrates childlike intimacy with a supernatural being reminiscent of the Windigo, who is then metaphorically linked to Satan. Fittingly, in effort to counter Marie’s intimacy with the devil, Sister Leopolda is seen variously hurling her "lance" and attempting to kick Marie into an oven, actions that, according to Jaskoski, are reminiscent of chivalric legend and fairytales such as “Hansel and Gretel,” respectively.[16] When Marie enters the convent, Jaskoski argues, she is the child that becomes the Windigo herself. She achieves symbolic victory over sister Leopolda when she catches a sense of the pitiful person at the core of Leopolda’s persona, much like when the vanquishing heroines of Windigo stories discover a person hidden inside the monster’s icy shell.[16]
Robert Silberman redirects critique of Love Medicine back to Western Literary traditions, noting that at the end of the day, Love Medicine is printed and marketed as a novel.[12] He writes: "the return to the literary is inevitable."[12] Silberman and Catherine Rainwater both discuss how Love Medicine rises out of the Western family saga, and remains heavily indebted to its conventions.[7][12] Silberman goes a step further and argues that the realism and naturalness of Erdrich’s characters, as evinced in their colloquialisms and in their first-person present tense narrations, is “as much a construction as the skill at creating a convincing voice that led Hemingway to see in Twain’s Huckleberry Finn the start of a genuine American literary tradition - an antiliterary, seemingly informal American style.”[12] Erdrich’s “literary antinomianism” has no shortage of precedents, Silberman claims, from Faulkner to Raymond Carver.[12]
Interpretative duality
James Ruppert and Catherine Rainwater argue that Native forms and Western Literary conventions bring with them opposing codes that make two entirely different interpretations of the same text possible.[18][7] Ruppert and Rainwater cite multiple such examples: for example, it is entirely possible to read Henry Lamartine’s story as either a tragic story about a soldier suffering from PTSD or a moral story about an Ojibwe warrior who is unable to escape the ghosts of his vanquished enemies.[7] Likewise, Rainwater argues, Gordie’s encounter with June’s ghost is either a drunken hallucination or a metamorphosis of June’s spirit that forces Gordie to confront his past abuses. In Rainwater’s words, this in-between position requires that the reader “consider perceptual frameworks as the important structural principle in both textual and non-textual realms.”[7]
Structure
Regardless of differences in critical and theoretical approaches, many scholars such as Wong, Ownes, and Rainwater agree that there exists an underlying structure that link Love Medicine's stories together.[15][7][4] On an intratextual level, Wong states, there exist many connective devices, from recurring symbolism to coinciding paths.[15] Hertha D. Sweet Wong points out the loosely chiasmic structure of Love Medicine, where symmetrically positioned chapters mirror each other on subject matter.[15] Wong, along with Owens, also notes that on an intertextual level, Love Medicine represents one component of a series of narrative sequences in the Love Medicine Sequence, with each narrative sequence being assigned its own natural element as a dominant image: Water (Love Medicine), Air (The Beet Queen), Earth (Tracks), and Fire (The Bingo Palace).[4][15] This thematic scheme has been explained by Erdrich herself in multiple interviews.[15]
