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 immanence of a soul history in the lives of the characters who live close to the land verges, Harrison implies, on predetermination.

Tristan's acquiescence to his impulses is made more powerful for its seeming implacability, as "like many men compelled to adventure with not interest in the notion of adventure but only a restlessness of the body and spirit, Tristan did not see anything particularly extraordinary about his past seven years" (248). Tristan makes little conscious decision to travel to specific places. His peripatetic adulthood fragments the life of his first wife, Susannah, to the point of her breakdown and death and facilitates the murder of his second wife, Two, who is hit between the eyes by a ricochet as Tristan smuggles liquor into the country during Prohibition. More than any other event in his life, Two's death takes him "well past simple notions of vengeance and perhaps grief had coarsened him to the point that he knew there was no evening the score with the world" (262-63). The final assessment of Tristan's status as myth-figure in Harrison's notion of soul history is summarized in the legend that grows out of Tristan's grief at the death of his wife. In describing the events that give Tristan his mythic qualities--"interesting in that forty years later Tristan was still an object of fascination, somehow the last of the outlaws, rather than a gangster" (255)--Harrison casts doubt on the very nature of myth-making and points out the changing attitudes of our society toward its myth-figures.

In the subsequent downward spiral of vengeance brought on by Two's death, Tristan rages against his remaining brother, Alfred, the symbol of a society that exists without any notions of the past or any real sense of the future, reaping instead the spoils of what it perceives as a vast, infinite wilderness. The novella form is perfect for such a delineation of solitude because it sacrifices great depth of character while it allows the author to focus his microscope on specific events that, taken in the aggregate, circumscribe the chaos and fragmentation of Tristan's life. The desire to detail a character's solitude for the reader is indicative of American post-war literature in which the author, posits Leslie Fiedler, "tries in his work to find techniques for representing a universe in which we share chiefly a sense of loneliness: our alienation from whatever things finally are, as well as from other men's awareness of those things and of us" (17). The idea of discovering and describing such spiritual seclusion shares an important element with Harrison's definition of soul history. In both cases, the hollowness of existence for the characters who feel so profoundly the weight of their own pasts allows them to transcend, for a time at least, the even more disjointed present.

In neither case, however, does the nostalgia for sanguine days on the Great Plains or America's love affair with the "Noble Savage" cloud Harrison's pragmatism. He is well aware that writing that attempts to cover the blemishes of our history can only fail, and, in the process, mitigate or distort the events that still influence us--a causal chain of events that, unless fully and accurately understood, could obscure our history to the point of its negation. Harrison's own narrative intrusions, written as clear manifestations of the author's vision, provide clues to the paradoxical conclusion of this myth: "The best words are ambiguous, and the more richly ambiguous the more suitable for the poet's or the myth-maker's job. Hence there is no end to the number of meanings which can be read into a good myth" (Douglas 167).