Throughout
Erdrich's short story "Love Medicine," smokescreens are used to show
the way in which characters hide what they're really thinking and how those around
them can either buy into the act or see through it.
Smokescreens
play an important role within the story from the very start. In paragraph 7,
Lipsha says, "Sometimes I'll throw up a smokescreen to think behind."
Instead of revealing how insightful he is to those around him, he hides it
behind a smokescreen to distract those who want to know what he's really
thinking. He's already revealed previously that he thinks Indians are the
smartest people on earth, yet he hides this intelligence. Even though it's
mentioned Lipsha failed out of school (paragraph 6), he's clearly very
intelligent and observant through the metaphors which he uses to look at the
world and comes to understand its universal truths, such as at the end of the
story when he says his grandfather came back not out of love medicine, but
because of real love.
He
also says smokescreens "irritate the social structure" (paragraph 7),
so this could be seen as his way of making others let their guards down around
him only to be proven that he is greater than they can imagine. He is smart and
he knows the world in ways they never could, but because they take him at face
value, they'll never understand more than what they let themselves believe.
This
same idea comes in a little later when Lipsha attends church with his grandfather.
After hearing the latter say he has to yell for God to hear him, Lipsha comes
to the conclusion that God has stopped listening. He expands upon this idea
further on, saying, "... faith is for you. It's belief even when the goods
don't deliver.... Faith might be stupid, but it gets us through"
(paragraph 72). This idea of believing what you must in order to get through
serves those around Lipsha who will look at him and not look past his
smokescreen because they need to believe his act in order to keep going through
their own worldview undeterred.
However,
the other two times in which smokescreens are mentioned, both are instances
when the act has been seen through, both times by the grandfather. The first is
in paragraph 9 when Lipsha pretends to attempt using the touch on his grandfather,
observing that, "I knew the smokescreen was going to fall" as his
grandfather saw right through his intentions. The second time is with the
grandmother, when she tries to feed her husband the turkey heart while Lipsha said,
"The way he looked at her made me think I was going to see the smokescreen
drop a second time, and sure enough it happened" (paragraph 117).
In
these cases, the grandfather actually cares enough about his wife and grandson
that he doesn't buy their smokescreens; he looks past them to his family's real
intentions because that's what matters to him. He wants to understand them
fully, and so he uses his own intense worldview in order to look into theirs.
