Towards Harmonizing the Mythic and The Modern in Erdrichs Tracks: A Magical Realist Perspective
This article is an endeavor to provide an insight into Native American novelist Louise Erdrich's use of the magical-realist technique in an attempt to harmonize the mythic and modern conceptions of reality represented by the Native American and Euro American subjects, respectively. The article demonstrates that in an attempt to seek a way possible to intertwine the two cultures, to wed the Native and the European ideologies of the world into accommodative space and to strike out the all-pervasive differences between the two people inhabiting the same land, Erdrich delves into the structuring principles of each culture's conceptualizing and internalizing the reality and the faith in it, and presents them as simultaneous albeit contrary versions of the same events, suggesting the possibility of simultaneous and harmonious co-existence of the two views, each retaining its essential outlook and yet respecting and accommodating the other. Employing Bower and Paula Gunn Allen's theoretical postulations of magical realism as a particular discourse embedded in the mythic and cultural beliefs of the Native American subjects, the article explores the mythic and modern formulations of female identity in Native American magical-realist fiction Tracks.