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

The cumulative effect of so rapidly layering events one on another can be dazzling or disappointing, and the critical reception of the novella reflects Harrison's ambitious attempt at demarcating the boundaries of American myth and articulating a concept as intricate as soul history in so short a narrative. To be sure, nothing is wasted in Harrison's dark vision. Tristan Ludlow, the son of Colonel William Ludlow, is an adventurer in the most capacious sense of the word, a man unable to satisfy himself within the conventions of society. The story is, above all, a tragic one, and Tristan is the catalyst for many of his own misfortunes. He is the quintessential myth-figure in a cultural milieu that, in the generation after Tristan's, will turn its back on such people. (3) William Roberson hits upon the impulse that allows Harrison to articulate such a vision of a society's fragmentation when he writes that

   The basic theme in Harrison's prose is the individual's attempt to come to
   terms with, and to survive in, contemporary society. Modern life is
   depicted as shapeless. Society inevitably provides no stability or security
   for the individual. He must create his own sense of meaning and belonging
   by finding something to personally place his faith in, an event or belief
   that will give his life form. (29)

That form is a statement of the soul history that is so vital in separating the myth of the American frontier with the sordid reality or, in Chenetier's terms, in drawing a connection between the story and its utility as a statement in thunder of the importance of passing a society's history from one generation to the next.

In the story Tristan's passion, imbued with the footnotes of history, is fueled by revenge. World War I provides a thematic underpinning that brings into focus the history that Harrison has taken upon himself to recreate. From the time that his brother Samuel is killed in a German ambush, Tristan lives apart from that history and moves freely from the carnage of the war to involve himself in an increasingly violent and tightening circle of adventure that finally brings him back to his beloved Montana landscape. Each successive striking out on Tristan's part is an attempt at redeeming his brother. Each adventure implicates Tristan further in history-making and transforms the protagonist's story into a legendary tale of struggle against implacable and random events, the history that threatens to swallow him whole.

Despite his interaction with his family and the characters upon whom he acts, even in death, Tristan is "apart, somehow solitary" (276). (4) From his early childhood, in fact, Tristan has learned to live apart from his family, something of an enigma even to his father. When Ludlow's three sons leave Montana to fight in the war, Colonel Ludlow wanders into Tristan's room, which is strewn with a hodgepodge of artifacts gleaned from the rugged Montana landscape: a mule deer skin, a badger skin, a bear claw necklace that was "no doubt a gift from One Stab whom Ludlow often felt was more the boy's father than he himself" (205). Indeed, Tristan is more closely aligned with One Stab than he is with any other character, and the totems of his relationship with One Stab, symbols of his interaction with the Native American culture that others of the people around him--including his brother Alfred, who is the type of the American hard-charging politician and entrepreneur--tend to eschew, establish the essential conflict between history and the narrative's present reality. (5)