NEW
Library Project
Volume 1, Number 3 - Winter 2003
Reading Without "Aiming So Much"
by Anndee Hochman
I thought of "The Shawl," by Chippewa writer Louise Erdrich, as
a difficult story. That's why I saved it for my second-to-last class at
Interim House, a residential drug treatment center for women in
Philadelphia.
The story's first section tells of a married woman with two children who
takes a lover and becomes pregnant with his child. Later, fleeing her
husband along with her daughter and the new baby, the woman's wagon is
attacked by wolves. The husband glimpses blood in the snow, spies his
daughter's shawl and comes to a cruel conclusion: that his wife must have
tossed their daughter to the wolves in order to save herself and her
lover's child.
In the second part of the story, a boy recalls his father's cruelty, then
tells how the older man finally breaks down, clutching a scrap of an old
shawl to his head for solace.
On my own, I struggled to sort the characters, to unravel the metaphor of
the shawl. It wasn't only understanding I reached for, but something else
- a feeling that I knew the story better than itself. How else, I thought,
could I unlock Erdrich's mysteries with a group of recovering addicts,
most of whom had barely finished high school?
There is a hinge in "The Shawl," a place where epiphany swings
open, and when I got to that place, Lavonne gasped. I kept reading. The
narrator offers his father a new version of the awful legend: perhaps the
girl - the narrator's aunt, the father's sister - was not thrown, but
jumped to the wolves in a gesture of self-sacrifice.
"He tells his dad that story so the father can finally have peace,"
Zetta said when I'd finished, my voice shaky with tears, my spine tingling
from the jab of the story's end.
The conversation swelled: the power of storytelling, the pain of
witnessing, the sorrows that haunt us. Zetta told of being abandoned as an
infant. Lavonne lamented how people in the African-American community
"won't help their own" anymore. And I thought about the advice
Seymour Glass offers his brother in J.D. Salinger's Raise High the Roof
Beam, Carpenters: "Could you try not aiming so much?"
Education teaches us to aim. To stand back, examine, compare, assess. We
learn that stories are subjective products of their authors' class, race,
sex and politics. We learn that critique is superior to enjoyment. We
learn to live outside the story, reluctant to enter and surrender
ourselves to its power.
I read "The Shawl" several months later at the Germantown Women's
Y, with a group that included a 7th-grade language arts teacher, a
hospital administrator and a freelance writer. Scott wanted to clarify the
characters' interconnections, Alice wanted to make sure she knew exactly
what happened, and Lynnell recalled a relevant quote she'd heard on public
television. Then Beverly, after making clear that she appreciated
Erdrich's complexity and craft, pushed her copy toward the center of the
table. "I hated this story," she said.
Discussing "The Shawl" and other stories at the Y was always
provocative: unpacking metaphors, speculating about a writer's use of
first person or present tense. But I rarely got chills, and I never cried.
"Books...show us how to live and die," writes Anne Lamott in
Bird by Bird. At Interim House, the women reminded me of the thing my own
education had made me forget: the consuming, delicious urgency of falling
head-first into a writer's words, the conviction that stories matter, that
they teach us not only about craft but about ourselves.