Shifting Boundaries: Reflections on Ethnic Identity in Louise Erdrich's The Master Butchers Singing Club
Marie Cornelia
Louise Erdrich has written a rich and finely textured novel in The Master Butchers Singing Club. Spanning the middle fifty years of the twentieth century, the novel begins just after the 1918 Armistice and concludes post World War II in 1954. It chronicles the life of master butcher Fidelis Waldvogel as he travels from Ludwigsruhe in the Rhineland to the plains of Argus, North Dakota where in the new world he embarks upon a new life. Woven into the texture of his life and that of his wife Eva and their children are the lives of several others in Argus, especially Delphine and Ray Watzka, Cyprian Lazarre and the Native American Step-and-a-Half.
The novel might be classified in several ways. It is a family saga, a tale of immigrant experience, a young woman's coming of age story and a mystery of sorts, but it is as a study of shifting and fluid identities that I wish to consider it here.
Germans figure with some frequency in English and American literature and stereotypes abound. One of the earliest stereotypes, and one recalled by most readers of Shakespeare is that of the German as a heavy drinker. In The Merchant of Venice, when the heroine Portia is questioned by her maid Nerissa about whether she fancies any of her international coterie of suitors, Portia disparages "the young German, the Duke of Saxony's nephew," by declaring that she likes him "very vildly in the morning when he is sober, and most vildly in the afternoon when he is drunk." For "when he is best, he is little worse than a man, and when he is worst, he is little better than a beast." (I.ii. 86-89) [1]
The notion of the German as little better than a beast abounds, of course, in the twentieth century especially, during which he is portrayed in popular American culture not as jolly drinker but as brutal perpetrator of two devastating world wars whose destructiveness is unparalleled. But there are other earlier stereotypical figures too. One I will describe because it was perhaps the first met in literature by generations of American girls growing up in the latter half of the nineteenth and throughout the twentieth century. It is that of the nineteenth century German scholar, poor and kindly, intellectually brilliant if a bit wooly minded in practical matters, bearded and bespectacled - and the chosen husband of Jo March, heroine of Little Women.[2] I remember so clearly at age eleven being a bit puzzled by Jo's rejection of the rich, young and dashing Laurie, but positively flabbergasted by her choice of "the professor" - Friedrich Bhaer - fusty and forty, and a widower to boot, with two young sons, holes in his sox and ever a book in his pocket. Re-reading the novel as an adult, the reasons for Jo's choice are evident: Jo is the bookish one of the sisters, hoping to make her living by her pen, anxious to be both independent and useful in the world. And ultimately she becomes that. After her marriage to the Professor, they open a school and home for boys in a perfect and perfectly happy partnership. But at age eleven, the soul cries out for adventure and romance, both of which seem very remote from the dull, staid, respectable figure of the nineteenth century German scholar.
The second figure of the German which populated the reading of my teenage years was that of the immigrant to the American mid-west, the pioneer who braved the vast plains to put down roots in the soil of the prairies. These are the legendary farmers who planted the "waving fields of grain" celebrated in "America the Beautiful." From the work of a first rate author like Willa Cather[3] (1873-1947) to the work of a lesser, though not less popular writer, Bess Streeter Aldrich[4] (1881-1954), this figure holds meaning and resonance. Conflated in my memory with the Norwegian settlers of O.E. Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1927), this figure sang to the grandchild of Italian immigrants who had also sailed from Europe in search of the American dream. In other words, the German, as one strand in the broad tapestry of the American immigrant experience, is a figure which I celebrate and which I cannot separate from my own most profound understanding of what constitutes America.
It is here that Louise Erdrich's work enters our discussion. Herself the offspring of German and Ojibwe ancestry, Erdrich's paternal grandfather came to the United States, seeking to make a new life for himself. Bringing butchering skills and a strong German ethnicity, he established himself in the Midwest where Erdrich grew up. Now, writing three-quarters of a century after Cather, Erdrich creates another immigrant hero in Fidelis Waldvogel, but one who comes fifty years after the great waves of German migration. Fidelis comes after the First World War, fleeing its horrors and his own part in them.
In Argus, North Dakota he settles, but not to farm. For Fidelis is a master butcher, trained and certified as such in his hometown of Ludwigsruhe, and immediately the ambiguities of his identity surface. For he is also a master butcher in another sense. In the war he had been a sniper, a sharpshooter, a marksman who never missed as he fired across no man's land at young men who were the mirror image of himself. He is, quite simply, extraordinarily good at what he does. In the old world, it was slaughtering men; in the new, it will be butchering animals to feed the burgeoning town of Argus. But Fidelis is not a lover of death. When the Armistice is signed, he walks home, embraces the already pregnant fiancée of his best friend who had been killed in the war, and chooses to love and nourish both Eva and the baby. Then like a new Adam and Eve, Fidelis and Eva seek their future in the new world. Fidelis leaves behind the Europe whose shifting political boundaries define a man's nationality and decide for him whom he is to shoot and kill. The arbitrariness of this is pointed out by Erdrich when she tells us on the novel's very first page that at the Armistice, "on Clemenceau's and Wilson's redrawn map," Fidelis is "only a few centimeters away from becoming French," [5] in other words, brother to those whom he had been targeting only a few days before. Fidelis turns his back on this artificial sort of identification and heads to America, armed now only with his butchering skills and his father's secrets of sausage making.
He enters through Lady Liberty's portal into that America which used to be described as a melting pot. But perhaps Fidelis bears with him a more apt metaphor. The sausage he carries in his suitcase is a product into whose making goes expert slicing and dicing of many meats, along with a fine hand for the addition of a wide variety of spices. As the novel progresses, we are reminded not only of the slaughter of the two World Wars, but of the slicing ferocity with which the tribal peoples of America were massacred to create the United States, and we are introduced to the wide variety of native Americans and European immigrants who comprise the population of Argus. This is a metaphor I do not wish to pursue further, but unlike Bismarck who remarked that one should not inquire too closely into the secrets of either sausage making or politics,[6] Erdrich is willing to confront the truth - and shame - of both the butcher's art and the treacherous policies employed by the United States government against the original inhabitants of its continent.
So Fidelis comes to Argus and settles in it simply because it is the place where in his transcontinental journey his money runs out. The town holds Germans, English, Poles, French, and Native Americans in a bewildering commingling of tribes. And we find that identities here too can be mysterious and unstable. Not only are nationalities mixed, but true sexuality is concealed, relationships are deceptive, and parentage is blurred.
Born in Argus, Polish in background, and destined to become Fidelis's second wife, Delphine Watzka is the feminine pole around which the novel is built and upon whom almost all its characters depend. Yet her identity is the most fluid of all. By the book's end, almost everything about her which we thought we knew has changed. Thinking herself motherless since childhood, Delphine, in fact, has a mother living. Sisterless, she believes, she becomes both sister and daughter to Eva, but later we learn that she has a blood sister who is also her daughter-in-law. Childless, she takes on the care of Eva's boys after Eva's death, and then replaces Eva as Fidelis's wife. She mothers the drunken father who raised her, but is not her father at all, and she is pseudo-wife/sister to the homosexual Cyprian Lazarre.
I describe this tangle of relationships not to confuse, but to illustrate that, with regard to identity, what matters in this novel is not who others or even we ourselves think we are; what matters is how we choose to act. Delphine chooses to be daughter and sister to the dying Eva, caring for her with the greatest tenderness, while Eva's real sister-in-law, Tante, cruelly takes from her the morphine she so desperately needs. Delphine loves and chooses to mother Eva's boys, cooking, baking, caring for them, while their blood Tante feels no affection and merely uses them for her own purposes. This is truly a novel which echoes Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle: children belong to the motherly. I would add with Erdrich that mother is as mother does. Two children in the novel are conceived in the darkness of war; two are re-born when rescued from the earth and slime that would swallow and bury them. Birth mothers and surrogate mothers are both life givers to these children and the identities of all are determined by the relationships they choose to create.
In the new world all are free to shape their own identities, to engage in self definition. This occurs in the area of nationality as well. When World War II breaks out, Argus's Schmidt renames himself Smith and Mr. Bucher becomes Mr. Book. All the Germans, Erdrich tells us, now "speak as much English as they know" (355). There was less need to do so before, but now as war begins, American identity is affirmed through the adoption of its language. The singing club even considers banning German songs, and Fidelis declares they shall sing "America songs," patriotic songs (337). He wants no part of the Germans, of whom he says: "They're a bunch of damned butchers" (366). "They," he says, distancing himself from his countrymen with the decisive use of the English pronoun. With his American wife Delphine in his present and the first great European war in his past, he has crossed the boundary. But later, alone, after the club has gone, he sings German songs, "old tunes that no one else knew" (338). They fill him with nostalgia, and he longs to see the faces of his parents. But then he recalls that the Germans are his enemies and he is filled with shame. He declares that his sons will fight them, will fight and rescue their brothers. For Fidelis's inner confusion over nationality has an external embodiment. His two elder sons will indeed fight as American soldiers, but the two younger boys, the twins, who had been sent to live with their grandparents in Germany after Eva's death, they will fight in the Fuehrer's army. Fidelis is clear about his nationality, but his ethnicity is not so easily erased. The ties to Germany remain strong and this division in loyalty will be played out tragically as one twin is killed by an American shell and the other turns his back on his father and on the America in which he was born, remaining resolutely German and devoted to Germany's terrible cause.
Fidelis and his sons battle on the killing fields of the old world, but the new world has its killing fields as well. Erdrich, who is herself part Native American, interweaves Fidelis's immigrant tale with the story of the people he comes to live among, the plains Indians. They are represented in the novel by Cyprian Lazarre, and Step-and-a-Half. Raised on a reservation, Cyprian is Chippewa, Ojibwe - and French. His French genes allow him to pass as Anglo, but he is the novel's half caste, its acknowledged metis or mixed breed, a wanderer who doesn't quite belong anywhere. When his homosexuality is added to the mix, he becomes "other" in yet another sense. His identity, like his life, is a balancing act. For Cyprian's great talent is that he is a balancing expert. Balancing on one hand on Delphine's stomach, juggling spinning plates, building and climbing a tower of chairs, his tensile strength holds it all together and makes his traveling carnival act an applauded one. But it is a strain, and Cyprian speaks longingly to Delphine about a homeland and his "famous ancestor, the Frenchman, Louis Riel, who died a martyr to the great vision of a mixed blood nation...a place with boundaries and an actual government," (78) a place where his kind would be the norm, the citizenry, the people, and be at home.
But in early twentieth century Argus, Cyprian's dream is far from realization, and Erdrich tells us that this Ojibwe who enlisted and was wounded in the first Great War was not yet considered a United States citizen, and that during his long recuperation he could not even vote (15). His Indian grandpa used the self-identifier, "Anishinaabeg - the humans" (77), but these humans, these tribal people were not part of the "We, the people" upon whom the United States Constitution was erected. The Anishinaabeg were cast as other and as enemy, and the campaign waged against them was not to assimilate but to annihilate them.
Which leads us finally to Step-and-a-Half. The novel's most haunting character, she strides through its pages, always walking, covering great distances, occasionally settling in Argus and transforming each life she touches. But she is the permanently displaced person, the refugee who fled from her own homeland, who escaped the terrible massacre of her people. As an eight year old child, she and her father, a northern Cree, had joined a starving group of Lakota who followed a treacherous army major "underneath the white flag of surrender to a military camp near a place called...in the English language, Wounded Knee" (324). There she witnessed "sights that she never can get out of her mind. She sees grown soldiers ride down women and then fire their guns point-blank as the women hold their little babies in the air....She watches a grown soldier on horseback chase down a skinny, weeping, stumbling boy" and another strip "a dead girl naked for her figured shirt" (325). She sees a mother with a nursing infant who keeps on nursing even as she's killed, with the baby still drinking and covered in its mother's blood.
"Which is when [she] walks right off, through it all, just mystified" (325). She walks for a lifetime, taking long and powerful strides which flee the horror but bring her no nearer to understanding the mystery at its heart, the mystery of how such deeds can be perpetrated, how humans can inflict such cruelty on other humans.
Delphine ponders the same mystery, but in its European context. In 1954 she accompanies Fidelis back to Ludwigsruhe where she feels "bewildered, darkly helpless. What kind of people were these?" (374) she wonders. At a town celebration to unveil a monument commemorating the bombing victims of Ludwigsruhe, she breathes in the "sweetness of a hothouse gardenia on some woman's bosom" (374), and then she hears the singing. The master butchers march in, mount the podium and begin their songs.
Their voices built a solid wall of melody. Delphine watched them, thoughts drifting. She began to listen past the singing. She didn't hear singing, soon, at all, but only saw the mouths of the men opening and shutting in unison, in a roar...She thought of all that had happened here, the burning and the marching, an enormity beyond her, a terrible strangeness in which things unbelievable were done. And yet, now, here were these butchers singing. And the songs were lovely to the ear. Her own husband's voice soared in the German air....
Then her eyelids were knocked upright. She saw what was really happening. As the veil was torn away, as the statue of the burned stood washed in pleasant sunlight, as the master butchers parted their lips in song, smoke and ash poured out of their mouth holes like chimneys. Their hearts were smoldering...Their guts were on fire. Their lungs were hot bellows. Yet they kept on singing as though nothing was wrong at all. Nobody pointed, no children cried. Darkness continued to spiral up out of the men's oven-bay chests. Smoke swirled, and drifted. Finally the singing ended. (375)
That horror and beauty can be conflated confounds Delphine. That this Germany of flowerboxes and strawberries and handmade gifts could have conceived the death camps and incinerated millions of Jews is beyond her comprehension. As it is beyond ours. In a novel that is filled with parallels and correspondences, with ironic dualities and repeated migration from east to west and back again, what emerges is the abiding mystery of man's inhumanity to man. From Auschwitz in the old world to Wounded Knee in the new, one race, one nationality slaughters another. The dream of a single nation of mixed bloods remains a dream; the designation of all as simply Anishinaabeg - humans - remains a Utopian straw in the wind. And yet in this world of horror the music persists. As Step-and-a-Half nears death, she hears it all:
Foolish ballads, strict anthems, German sailors songs and the paddling songs of voyageurs, patriotic American songs. Other times, Cree lullabies, sweat lodge summons, lost ghost dance songs, counting rhymes, and hymns to the snow. (388)
Beautiful all, "Our songs travel the earth. We sing to one another" (388). In spite of all, our world like Erdrich's, possesses a beauty that both consoles and confounds, a world where in an eternal contradiction which surpasses all understanding, "butchers sing like angels" (388).
Endnotes
1 William Shakespeare, The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).
2 Louisa May Alcott, Little Women: First and Second Parts (Boston: Roberts Brothers,1868-69). Dozens of editions have been published since this first one.
3 See, for example, O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Antonia (1918). All are available in a variety of modern editions.
4 Among the prolific Aldrich's best known novels are A Lantern in Her Hand (1928), A White Bird Flying (1931), and Spring Came On Forever (1935).
5 Louise Erdrich, The Master Butchers Singing Club (New York: Harper Collins, 2003) All citations in my text are to this edition of the novel.
6 The popular aphorism attributed to Bismarck has been variously rendered. One version declares that "to retain respect for sausage and laws, one must not watch them in the making."