Transformation in Louise Erdrich’s The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse
“The devil works with a shrewd persistence, Miss DeWitt, and is never known to give up a soul merely because it is a thing willed in heaven. Our labor is required here on earth, in the ordinary world. Evil, oh yes, evil…”
[Agnes replies,] “What do you know of evil? ...I’ve seen evil…It has blue eyes and brown shoes. About size ten. The feet are narrow. The hands are square. The build is slight and I’d say the face, though not handsome, has an intriguing changeability about it. Though I am only now repossessing my memory of all the specifics, Father Modeste, I’ve seen the devil himself and he was disguised in a rumpled cassock.” (35)
The Actor, the one “who took on…disguises,” he sometimes clothed himself in the likeness of “an old man, other times a pregnant woman, a crippled youth” (23). But on the day he encountered Miss DeWitt, he clothed himself in the robes of a priest.
In Louise Erdrich’s The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, there are two figures who don the garb of a priest without the sanction of the holy order: Agnes DeWitt and the Actor. Is there such a difference in their deception? Or, more adeptly, we might consider: is it inherently sinful to cloth yourself in a fabric, a skin, a likeness that is not one’s own by nature? Are we to condemn Agnes DeWitt as a falsifier, a fraud, an “Actor”? Or are we to believe that Agnes DeWitt’s transfiguration is sincere and ordained by God as a part of his “good, pleasing, and perfect will?” (Romans 12:2, NIV). In considering these questions, perhaps we ought to consider another story of transfiguration in the novel.
Having survived the great flood, Agnes is weakened both in spirit and in flesh. “Exhausted [by] fear,” Agnes wakes to the “smell of cooking.” “Starving,” Agnes “moved toward [the spoon]” of warm broth as if she were being “lured like an animal” (42). Only then does she realize that the spoon is held by a man. In his letter to the Philippians, Paul writes,
In your relationships with one another have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in the appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross! (Philippians 2:5-8, NIV)
You see, the Actor and Agnes are not the only individuals to transfigure themselves in The Last Report. Christ himself alters his form, his appearance, his likeness in order to offer “comfort” to a lonely young woman exhausted by the storms of life (72).
And herein lies the difference, I believe, between Agnes DeWitt and the Actor. Beneath his “rumpled cassock,” the Actor, the devil in the flesh, is a heart “entirely ruthless,” “[caring] nothing for human life” (23). The Actor disguises himself with the clothing of a priest, but he is not transformed. 1 John 3:14 says, “We know that we have passed from death to life
because we love one another. Whoever does not love abides in death.” Unlike the Actor, who not only remains in death but revels in it, Agnes DeWitt is transfigured into the likeness of Father Damien Modeste because she has, as Paul describes in his letter to the Colossians, “put on a new self” (Colossians 3:10, NIV).
In one of his letters to the Pope, Father Damien writes, “Having met Him just that once, having known Him in a man’s body, how could I not love Him until death? How could I not follow Him? Be thou like as me, were His words, and I took them literally to mean that I should attend Him as a loving woman follows her soldier into the battle of life, dressed as He is dressed, suffering the same hardships” (43-4)
Transformed by the love of Christ, Agnes DeWitt “trimmed off her hair and…buried it with [the corpse of Father Damien Modeste] as though…he was the keeper of her old life” (44). Though “[t]he devil works with a shrewd persistence” and is “never known to give up a soul merely because it is a thing willed in heaven,” Agnes follows down a strange path as Father Damien because Christ has already “[broken] the trail” (23; 123) Agnes DeWitt, “a woman created of impossibility,” alters her form just as Christ altered his form so that the Ojibwe people might also be transformed (28). Paul writes,
Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—that is your true and proper worship. Do not conform the ways of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is--his good, pleasing and perfect will. (Romans 12:1-2, NIV)
As the narrator observes, “Through You, in You, with You. Aren’t those beautiful words?” (43).
Works Cited
Erdrich, Louise. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. New York: Harper Perennial, 2001. 1-361. Print.
Holy Bible: New International Version. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994. Print.