The Leap

Postmodern and even magical realist elements render this story not only a larger-than-life family memory but also an interrogation of how we come to know the past and the motives of others. As in many postmodern tales, the narrator is unreliable. She is herself playing detective and collaging together a picture of her mother from old tabloids and unreliably “breathless” news articles, as well as painting the entire tale over with her own fascination with Harry Avalon and her mother’s former life. The narrator is sure the latter was more glamorous than life as a mother in a “sagging farmhouse” in New Hampshire.

Erdrich has at times rejected the label magical realism, as when she told The Atlantic, “My work has never really seemed fantastical to me” (Bacon, Katie. “An Emissary of the Between-World: A Conversation with Louise Erdrich,” The Atlantic, January 2001). There are solid literary-historical reasons for rejecting the label too. Magical realism was a movement pioneered in Latin America, most notably by Gabriel García Márquez in Colombia and Jorge Borges in Argentina in the 1960s. This in turn influenced Chilean writer Isabel Allende and postmodern English-speaking authors like Angela Carter, Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and Salman Rushdie. Erdrich, by contrast, has named Toni Morrison and her own parents’ oral storytelling as among her greatest influences. Her “magical realism” is subtler than that of writers like Márquez and Borges, though her novel Tracks, published two years before “The Leap,” does feature a probable lake monster and a woman who seems able to call storm winds from a clear sky. The latter, however, needed the help of a handsaw for those winds to fell trees. If Erdrich’s attention to a more than human world and more than ordinary occurrences can look like magical realism, it may be more due to convergent aesthetics—i.e., those of a spiritual life comprising both Catholicism and traditional Ojibwa beliefs—than direct influence.

“The Leap” contains two great and obvious improbabilities, which also coincide with the first and third life debts the narrator owes to her mother: the chain of events that leads lightning to strike the tent just as the Flying Avalons sail through the air (as well as her mother’s ensuing survival) and the titular leap to Anna’s daughter’s bedroom. These are more than ordinary events, and the glamour of legend clings to them. This is particularly true in the context of Tales of Burning Love, where the relaying of the story is meant to instruct, save, and entertain rather than to establish facts. The artifacts of the story’s construction—the narrator’s distance from events, her desire to valorize her mother’s early life, and her attempts to assemble it from unreliable sources—likewise underscore that the story is in fact a story, suggesting that a perfectly non-magical explanation for events may exist. However, the story paints the factual details of the past and the motivations of its actors as largely unknowable. The Difficulty of Knowing the Past Through Story is on display in the narrator’s frequent use of words like “probably,” “perhaps,” and “must have.” These ambiguities place sufficient disclaimers on her version of events to void the need for magical explanation while simultaneously holding the “true” story out of reach.

The second event to which the narrator “owes” her existence notably lacks the fantastical elements of the first and third. She says, “I owe my existence, the second time then, to the two of them [her mother and father] and the hospital that brought them together” (Paragraph 17). This is a story of the meeting of two parents such as almost any person might have, even if their mother is not a circus star. It strives to invest or re-invest with wonder the ordinary facts of any human being’s entry into the world, referring to the meeting of one’s parents as “the debt we take for granted since none of us asks for life” (Paragraph 17). This framing, sandwiched between two extraordinary occurrences, suggests that The Unlikely Miracle of Life is as wild a reality as Anna Avalon outside her daughter’s bedroom window.

It is thus in the indelible fact of Anna’s motherhood that this story ultimately trusts, painting the narrator’s birth and symbolic rebirth, falling from a burning house while curled against her mother’s stomach, as acts of “survivance”—of continuity and love that deliver the narrator to safety even amidst disaster and heartbreak. At the heart of it, no trapeze is required, which sheds new light on the narrator’s discussion of The Compromises From Which People Make Their Lives. Anna’s “exchange” of trapeze work for domesticity is a kind of sacrifice, but not as the narrator imagines it. Rather, it is a recognition that one cannot cling to a particular life (or life itself) indefinitely. Existence requires compromise, but Anna makes the best of it via various “leaps” of faith.