Neurodivergent Narrative, Psychoanalysis, and Cross-Cultural Communication in Louise Erdrich’s Fiction

Abstract

By making the expectations of language, coherence and meaning subject to challenge, neurodivergent storytelling is the act of foregrounding other modes of perception, expression and relational understanding. This chapter dwells on neurodivergent narrative as a form of cross-cultural communication in the contemporary fiction of Louise Erdrich, based on the psychoanalytic distinction of the semiotic and symbolic of Julia Kristeva. The analysis of The Night Watchman (2020), The Sentence (2021) and The Mighty Red (2024), based on the use of non-linear structures, repetition, sensory description, and affective rhythms, the study discusses the ways Erdrich uses these devices to enumerate Indigenous and marginalized types of consciousness resistant to dominant linguistic and cognitive patterns. The semiotic idea of Kristeva which belongs to pre-verbal drive, rhythm of the body, intensity of emotion provides a fruitful perspective in the interpretation of the story disruptions in Erdrich when meaning is frequently a product of feeling, memory, relationship presence and not logical development. Such semiotic moments do not cancel out the symbolic order of language but exist alongside the symbolic order, and generate narratives that appreciate accessibility, empathy and intuitive comprehension and maintain the principle of coherence. Erdrich transforms the act of storytelling into a communicative space that is inclusive through ghostly figures, fractured time, and highly interior voices. This article states that her fiction presents neurodivergent narrative as a mediating practice of culture, and that ethical reading practices that are based on attentive listening, emotional openness, and mutual vulnerability across cultural borders should be promoted.