MAGIC AND MEMORY IN THE CONTEMPORARY STORY CYCLE

'I his remarkable image of the Northern Lights, from the first story of Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, evokes one young character's appreciation for the enigmatic ties of kin and community as she lies in a field, confounded by the complexities of her own familial and tribal histories. In Albertine Johnson's vision, the lights transform the sky into a field of memory where all the world's citizens share a collective narrative made up of individual thoughts, images, and events. The sky reflects these secrets of solitary consciousnesses onto a site of communal memory at once random and yet "all of a piece." The image resonates because it revises common notions about the memory, asserting that it is not ultimately private and untraceable, that there is a collective order to the apparent chaos of the indistinct relationships Albertine deciphers during her star gaze. This interpretation substitutes for linear history and neatly mapped family trees a web-like nervous system endlessly multiplying and interweaving human experiences in a complex and random network, impossible to tease apart. The reflection provides