Mythmaking and the consequence of "soul history" in Jim Harrison's Legends of the Fall

Studies in Short Fiction, Fall, 1999 by Patrick A. Smith

   O History, as Carl Becker remarked, how many truths are committed in thy
   name! But there is no cynicism in this observation as long as it means that
   the course of events, like a moving train, provides new positions from
   which to survey the track left behind. Later events must inevitably focus
   our attention on earlier ones. Similarly, all inquiry is guided by
   developing concepts that have their own history.

   --Cushing Strout, The Veracious Imagination

History, our prevailing attitude goes (and this is the particularly cynical view), is for people who choose to live in the past and who have enough time on their hands to study irrelevant, arcane events. Even American literature, ostensibly safe from such shortsightedness, neglects the essential importance of our past on the events that occur today. In his assessment of the curious dearth of American historical fiction up to the 1970s, Henry Claridge writes that "It is an accepted part of the 'conventional wisdom' about the American novel that it has largely eschewed history and society in preference for existential and metaphysical speculation" (9). Claridge's assertion is well-founded. Such American literary luminaries as Philip Roth have contended for decades that the increasing number and the unmitigated violence of history-changing events with which Americans have had to cope is an excuse for the novelist to hide in his fiction, a way for the author to ignore the historical aspects of his craft. The writer, Roth claimed in an address at Stanford University in 1960, has "his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It asserts, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's meagre imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist" (176).

The lost past that Roth and Claridge bemoan is given voice in the short fiction of Jim Harrison, whose novellas resound with the tragedies of our past and whose stories limn an unsavory history that leads his characters--and his readers--through a process of introspection to understanding. Harrison places great value on a knowledge of our nation's history, and he meets head-on the difficulties of (re)writing history as he characterizes the baser side of our national consciousness. His narratives often detail some lapse in judgment that exposes the fundamental absurdity of our actions and brings the past directly to bear on the present and the future. Although he is less concerned with the actual events that constitute the collective American historical consciousness, he is intimately aware of the consequences of those events on our present. Harrison has observed that "[The United States] has a history, but it also has a soul history, and that's what I was interested in. Our original sin in this country was the desecration of the Indians" (Stocking 19).

In his novella Legends of the Fall (1979), Harrison emphasizes the importance of soul history, a concept that synthesizes the Jungian notion of a collective unconscious and the accreted guilt for past actions that holds us accountable for those events. Our present, far removed from the most blatant appropriations of our culture on America's native cultures, still echoes with the disquietude of the past. Harrison defines soul history in his essay "Poetry as Survival": "Our nation has a soul history, not as immediately verifiable as the artifacts of the Smithsonian, whose presence we sense in public affairs right down to [Ronald Reagan's] use of the word `preservation,' or his cinema-tainted reference to oil-rich Indians" (300). Soul history insists on our culpability for the past even as we reshape and deny that past, and it allows us to detail contemporary American history as distinctly different from, although always part of, a history that the Eurocentric majority has appropriated in perpetuating the myth of the American Dream. Contextualizing the past in terms of its continuing effects on our present even calls into question the two dissimilar notions that encompass that most American of phrases, the "American Dream": first, the pride and fervor with which we have decimated our natural resources and continue to ignore (at the least; at worst, persecute) our marginalized peoples; second, the mythos of the individual who lives apart from history and has the wherewithal to forge a place among the demigods of American legend. Above all other forms of expression literature, itself an odd synthesis of Jungian psychology and the American Dream, serves as a litmus test for a society's ability to accurately assess its own goals, in no small part because "literature is a repository of both a society's ideologies and its psychological conflicts" and therefore "it has the capacity to reveal aspects of a culture's collective psyche" (Tyson 1). It is by putting our literature to the test that we can assess the viability of our aspirations.