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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
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)
In Tristan's room, Ludlow discovers a worn copy of "Report of a Reconnaissance of the Black Hills of Dakota.... He had not opened the book in three decades mostly out of grief that his recommendations on the Sioux had been not taken, even scorned, after which he resigned his commission and left for Vera Cruz" (206). The book is a treatise that Ludlow himself had written on the "Indian Question," which figures so prominently in much of Harrison's fiction, including Legends of the Fall. Ludlow, a member of the Seventh Cavalry, has advised that the "region is cherished by the owners as hunting grounds and asylum.... The Indians have no country farther west to which they can migrate" (207). The Colonel's terse statement underscores the importance of Native American values in the narrative, particularly in the life of the passionate and spiritual Tristan, who has underlined portions of the text. In the highlighted passages, Ludlow traces Tristan's development apart from his family and as part of the Native American culture. His marks on the pages include "a passage on a blood-red moon that fired the beige landscape, to which Tristan had added `I seen this phenom, once with Stab who would not talk at campfire'" (208).
