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

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.

Certainly, imbuing literature with the power to reflect (and, one might hope, to change) a society's mindset is nothing new; nor is the notion that the writing of history in fiction should be as attentive to the story as it is to the history itself. Marc Chenetier notes in his study of history in contemporary American fiction that "Oscar Wilde, lamenting that `lying [should] have fallen into disrepute', already considered Herodotus as `the father of lies' and held that our duty toward history was to rewrite it. The works of Michel Foucault have given the last push, shifting the status of History from positivistic to `Western myth'" (147). Chenetier's treatise, which he appropriately subtitles "The Constrained Nightmare," traces an American obsession with history that has its most inauspicious beginnings in Columbus's plunge into the wilderness and continues into the late nineteenth century until the height of the Industrial Revolution and the extermination of our native peoples. (1)

Nowhere in Harrison's fiction does the history of a family and a people have more impact on the present than in Legends of the Fall, a compressed and imagistic story of the survival and creation of history during and after World War I. The novella is a study in revenge and a commentary on the madness that ensues when a family is destroyed by force and chance. In the narrative, Harrison denotes an American mythological archetype that once again dismisses, though not without careful consideration, our romantic notions of Cowboys and Indians and focuses on the destructive change of events that comprise history and that constitute the soul history of a nation. Legends of the Fall succinctly portrays the immediate effect of several discrete myth-making events of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries--World War I, the Indian Wars, the Depression, Prohibition, and the advent of an unprecedented national mobility--on a wealthy Montana plains family. The result is a lean and taut expression of a soul history that describes the life of a man who straddles two distinct epochs in our nation's consciousness: one still condones, and perhaps admires, the actions of the myth figure; the other has thrown off the veil of innocence and Manifest Destiny that spawned the American Myth in favor of a more jaundiced view of a world that has become too experienced to allow such figures. Harrison based the novella on his reading of the journals of Colonel William Ludlow, his wife's great-grandfather, and the narrative began to take shape when he "wondered what would have happened if Ludlow had ended up in Montana instead of Michigan's Copper Country" (Reilly 78). That Harrison found the subject matter intriguing is hardly surprising, given the obvious potential of the Ludlow legacy as Harrison interprets it in a series of scattershot images that form the counter-story to the western mythos that became increasingly untenable in the aftermath of the first World War. (2)

Mary Douglas, the British anthropologist to whom Harrison repeatedly refers in conversation, delimits the function of myth, which is "to portray the contradictions in the basic premises of the culture," and also the relation of myth to society, in which the myth is "a contemplation of the unsatisfactory compromises which, after all, compose social life" (156). The result of mythmaking is that, "In the devious statements of the myth, people can recognize indirectly what it would be difficult to admit openly and yet what is patently clear to all and sundry, that the ideal is not attainable" (156). With so much at stake in so brief a delineation of soul history and myth, little wonder that most critical opinion that addresses the intricacies of the narrative points to the novella as either an abbreviated epic or saga. Edward Reilly's observation that both epics and sagas "hinge on ominous and tragic actions.... Tragedy and doom stalk the Ludlows' (80) points up the novella's terse complexity, a series of heroic deeds and history packed so tightly as to create the effect of one highly charged event. Keith Opdahl describes Harrison's style in the novella as "honest and revealing," and the right style for the form, "mostly summary, as though we look from a distance, with a tone that catches the large perspective and mute struggle of the character himself" (24). In this instance, Tristan Ludlow is the explosive, visceral protagonist who represents the larger perspective, the soul history of a country.

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)

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).

The most disturbing image in the book for Ludlow is a "description of buffalo skulls which Ludlow recognized foresaw One Stab's Ghost Dance superstitions and Tristan's boyish passion, `A man who shoots a buffalo and not eat the entire body and make a tent or bed of the skin should himself be shot, including the bone marrow which Stab says restores all health to the human body'" (208). Tristan's addenda contrast to the literate, almost poetic style of Northridge's chronicles in Harrison's novel Dalva (1988), which similarly portrays soul history through a Native American context. While Northridge relies on his best powers of observation to record the assimilation and destruction of the people of whom he become a part, Tristan writes with an unstudied passion that arises from his relationship with One Stab, the corner-stone of his spiritual understanding of soul history. While Northridge's journals have intrinsic value for historians, Tristan's musings will never be read by anyone but his own father, who must draw conclusions about his son from the few objects in the room and two terse statements of unfettered individuality.

Tristan's psychic and spiritual distance from his own brothers is apparent in their journey to Calgary, where they will join the Canadian forces enlisted to fight in the war. Tristan kills a deer and shares the liver with One Stab, "to the disgust of Samuel who only ate deer meat out of instinctive politeness. Alfred, as usual, was ruminative and noncommittal, wondering how One Stab and Tristan could eat so much meat. He preferred beef" (197). Tristan has always considered One Stab his mentor, and the relationship is one of mutual respect. They know each other so well, in fact, that One Stab is able to foresee the coming tragedy of the Ludlow family: One Stab "picked up Samuel's saddle as if he were picking up doom herself, doom always owning the furthest, darkest reaches of the feminine gender" (197). Each member of the Ludlow family fulfills the tragic events of One Stab's prophetic vision. He is placed in the spiritually privileged position of seer, the link between Tristan and the soul history that, of the Ludlow family, he alone can understand. Only Tristan comprehends One Stab's relationship with nature; only Tristan can make the connection between history and the present.

One Stab has vowed not to forget his own history, a fact that endears him to both Tristan and the Colonel. While One Stab likes the taste of beer and whiskey, he only rinses his mouth with the drink and spits it on the ground, an act that amuses Samuel and Alfred, but that Tristan understands in terms of his own longing for the landscapes of home: One Stab "was a Cheyenne, but had spent his last thirty years in Cree and Blackfoot territory and had decided he would only get drunk if he ever returned to Lame Deer before he died.... [Only Tristan] understood and had been close to One Stab since the age of three while Samuel and Alfred tended to ignore the Cheyenne" (198). Colonel Ludlow, who is also sympathetic to One Stab, shares the tragic vision of his sons' demise, thus cementing his relationship with Tristan and One Stab in a prophetic dream in which "his sons die in a battle while he stood helplessly on the outcrop of a butte; then he had looked down and noted that he wore elkskin leggings, and was, in fact, One Stab" (204).

The relationships in Ludlow's life are a study in contradiction: Although he associates himself with the spiritual side of human nature by envisioning himself as One Stab, his estranged wife lives a life of culture in Boston and takes lovers. The impulse to travel that has come down through the Ludlow family is vulgarized by Mrs. Ludlow, whose unwillingness to live with her family close to the earth on the plains of Montana alienates the young Tristan. Clearly, this is Tristan's narrative, and Ludlow's realization that Tristan will be, like several generations of Ludlow men, a free spirit who often disdains family for adventure, underscores Tristan's early independence. Through its distilled form, the novella buoys that independence by concentrating its energies almost wholly on the protagonist's conflict with society. William Roberson astutely points out that "Harrison's novels are sparsely populated because the focus is upon the individual in a crisis situation, the individual who endures under difficulties. This effort to survive and establish an identity and purpose causes them to be self-occupied, they must depend upon themselves because society offers them no support" (36). Because actions, not words, are at the forefront of the narrative's plot, Harrison makes no attempt to explain why Tristan does what the does; rather, Tristan lives within, not through, the history that Harrison describes, and his actions must speak for themselves if Harrison is to successfully delineate the soul history that invariably places society at odds with its past.

In fact, as a result of the freedom of action that Tristan is granted in the narrative, the conflict between the "natural" and the "societal" forms a narrative crux. The attitude of Tristan's mother toward her family points up the essential differences between nature and society and forces upon Tristan the maintenance of the soul history that is lived out through his adventures. That conflict is posited repeatedly when Tristan's brother Alfred is injured in a fall from his horse near Ypres and when, shortly after Alfred's accident, Samuel is killed by mustard gas and a hail of German bullets. Tristan's fury at his younger brother's death becomes legendary in the Northwest, as Tristan "went mad and there are still a very few old veterans up in Canada that remember his vengeance, because he was captured and restrained before it reached full flower" (217). That Tristan's fury never fully manifests itself on the German soldiers, several of whom Tristan and his friend Noel kill and scalp, is significant: His retribution on his brother's murderer can never reach closure, and he will spend the remainder of his life trying to replace his brother, as in his marriage to Susannah, in which he attempts to create a simulacrum of Samuel by being "a truly crazed lover though not for any biological reason, but the wound in his brain.... Tristan had in mind the making of a son to replace his brother and that was the sole purpose of his marriage" (226, 224). Tristan strikes blindly, unceasingly, and often ineffectually at society in an effort to cope with such a fundamental loss. Only his viscerality and his spirituality--within himself and within the physical and psychic landscapes that define his personality--make such a thing possible.

The importance of place for Tristan--as a repository for the soul history of his family through the connection that Tristan wills between One Stab and himself--impels him to cut Samuel's heart from his badly mangled body and encase it in paraffin for burial in Montana. The obvious symbolism of Tristan's action reinforces his respect both for his brother and for his home, an attitude that contrasts markedly with the lack of respect that both Tristan's brother Alfred and his mother exhibit through their unwillingness to live apart from "civilized society." While Tristan rails against transgressions on the land, Alfred clearly understands the "prerogative of the those who owned the capital" (241).

The land, according to One Stab, is suffused with and by history. Shortly after Samuel's death, news of which had yet to reach Montana, One Stab contemplates the topography of the land around him and the heights of the mountains, which Tristan had taught him, and wonders, as if somehow conjoined to Tristan's own spirit, "What did the numbers mean if there were no sea near them? Some large mountains have no character while certain smaller ones are noble and holy places with good springs" (219). When news of Samuel's death reaches the Ludlows, One Stab sings a song in Cheyenne "about Samuel's life and his forest hikes and microscopes that revealed invisible worlds, then moved into the Cheyenne death song at which Ludlow broke down not having heard the song since forty years before in the Mauvaises Terres when a scout had died" (221). Tristan, acting on the sense of duty that One Stab has nurtured in him, travels back to Montana carrying his brother's heart. The epitaph he writes for his brother emphasizes Tristan's increasing cynicism toward life and the knowledge that his time in history is ephemeral and that action is the only way of leaving one's mark for posterity: "WE WILL NOT SEE HIM / BUT WE SHALL JOIN HIM" (225). The event impenetrates in Tristan's spirit the impulses that will drive him toward an understanding of the tragedy and the answers that are destined to elude him. For Tristan, "there was the unspoken, unthought, unrehearsed sense that time and distance would reveal to him why Samuel died" (237).

The myth-figure's transition period has begun. Tristan's attitude toward the death of his brother echoes Harrison's own complex mantra invoked at the death of the individual, repeated again and again until we finally understand the pattern enveloping and delineating the narrative's structure. In a passage that offers both a sensual and rhetorically logical definition of the soul history that allows Tristan to endure his family's tragedy and that provides a framework for the larger history that pervades his protagonist's consciousness, Harrison writes,

   People finally don't have much affection for questions, especially one so
   leprous as the apparent lack of a fair system of reward and punishments on
   earth. The question is not less gnawing and unpleasant for being so otiose,
   so naive. And we are not concerned with the grander issues: say the Nez
   Perce children receiving the hail of cavalry fire in their sleeping tents.
   Nothing quite so grotesque as the meeting of a child and a bullet. And what
   distances in comprehension: the press at the time insisted that we had won.
   We would like to think that the whole starry universe would curdle at such
   a monstrosity: the conjunctions of Orion twisted askew, the arms of the
   Southern Cross dropping. Of course not: immutable is immutable and everyone
   in his own private manner dashes his brains against the long-suffering
   question that is so luminously obvious. Even gods aren't exempt: note
   Jesus' howl of despair as he stepped rather tentatively into eternity. And
   we can't seem to go from large to small because everything is the same
   size. Everyone's skin is so particular and we are so largely unimaginable
   to one another. (231)

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).

Myth, then, because it relies on the myth-teller as much as it does the hero's deeds, does not always end in grand fashion. And since the writer/ teller of the myth controls its context in any attempt at reconstructing the myth, such an explication of the myth will result "in frustration and futility, underscoring the Keatsian outlook that only in appreciation for the creative act or work of art itself can there by any real feeling of lasting satisfaction" (Umphlett 35). The supernova that is the myth is extinguished by its own burning; Harrison's novella ends and the conclusion is bittersweet at best: "There's little more to tell. Susannah was buried next to Samuel and Two and the reader, if he or she were a naive believer, might threaten God saying leave him alone or some such frivolity. No one has figured out how accidental is the marriage of blasphemy and fate" (272-73).

The delineation of soul history--both in its incarnation as the refashioning of myth (Tristan's living within history) and the (re)construction of history (the author's own interpretation of events)--relies, finally, on those who understand the consequences of history. In Harrison's fiction, the characters who bear the weight of history are most often Native Americans and those steeped in their culture. In the novella's epilogue, One Stab simultaneously mourns and celebrates the tragedy of Tristan's life and the death that comes too easily at the hands of the Ludlows: "It was One Stab who went mad before the full echo of the shots had faded. He danced and sang around the bodies, his body arched and prancing and his voice crooning, then he stooped and held the fainting Ludlow in his arms. Tristan knew if it were not Ludlow's kill, One Stab in the excitement might have taken scalps" (275). Scalps and dead bodies, journals and government treatises--like the stories that Harrison has crafted and the words that make up the stories--are not merely symbols, a manner of relegating the present to the past, but also totems of past events that exert a palpable influence on the present. One Stab is alive; the enemy is dead. The events of the past that come down to us wait to be resurrected and reconstructed and made part of a soul history, written across the generations.

(1) A point seemingly tangential to the discussion at hand, although our national obsession with specific details of history, upon which "facts" we base much of our national mythology, is a paradox that requires more fleshing out than I can give it in this short space. That we remember what we want to remember and disregard the rest is a notion at which Harrison takes umbrage, a point that he makes abundantly clear in his discussion of the treatment of Native Americans.

(2) Certainly, the vignettes themselves are not "scattershot" in the sense that the narrative is disjointed or inadequately realized. The seeming arbitrariness of the images, however (Harrison intrudes at one point to advise the reader that happiness is sometimes not worth describing), is indicative of Harrison's execution of the novella form, as he pulls disparate, frenetic images together to make sense of Tristan's anguished life. Sparseness, especially in adept hands, does have its rhetorical advantages. The length of the story leaves little room for introspection or philosophizing, and instead gains it power from the taut, visceral images that make up Tristan's life and the lives of those around him.

(3) By the time he writes the two Brown Dog novellas, the eponymous story coming 10 years after Legends of the Fall, Harrison has placed his protagonist in a context in which the best that he can hope for is to distinguish himself as an anti-mythic character.

(4) That Tristan lives well into his eighties is perhaps an indication that the burden of soul history is perpetuated by those who understand it best and yet are left to suffer its consequences.

(5) Harrison's view of the mingling of Native American and European cultures in Legends of the Fall is not the cynical interaction between the two that the author presents in the Brown Dog novellas.

WORKS CITED

Chenetier, Marc. "History in Contemporary American Fiction, or The Constrained Nightmare." History and Post-War Writing. Ed. Theo D'haen and Hans Bertens. Amsterdam: Kodopi, 1990. 147-69.

Claridge, Henry. "Writing on the Margin: E. L. Doctorow and American History." The New American Writing: Essays on American Literature since 1970. Ed. Graham Clarke. London: Vision, 1990. 9-28.

Douglas, Mary. Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology. London: Routledge, 1975.

Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. Rev. ed. New York: Stein and Day, 1966.

Harrison, Jim. Dalva. New York: Dutton/Seymour Lawrence, 1988.

--. Legends of the Fall. New York: Delta/Seymour Lawrence, 1979.

Opdahl, Keith. "Junk Food." Rev. of Legends of the Fall by Jim Harrison. Nation 7 July 1979: 23-24.

Reilly, Edward C. Jim Harrison. New York: Twayne, 1996.

Roberson, William H. "A Good Day to Live: The Prose Works of Jim Harrison." Great Lakes Review 8.2-9.1 (1982-83): 29-37.

Roth, Philip. Reading Myself and Others. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985.

Stocking, Kathleen. "Hard Cases: Conversations with Jim Harrison and Tom McGuane, Riders of the Purple Rage." Detroit News Magazine (12 Aug. 1980): 14-15+.

Strout, Cushing. The Veracious Imagination: Essays on American History, Literature, and Biography. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan UP, 1981.

Tyson, Lois. Psychological Politics of the American Dream: The Commodification of Subjectivity in Twentieth-Century American Literature. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State UP, 1994.

Umphlett, Wiley Lee. Mythmakers of the American Dream: The Nostalgic Vision in Popular Culture. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1983.

PATRICK A. SMITH teaches in the Department of English at Florida State University. His recent essays have appeared in Scribner's American Writers (ed. Jay Parini) and Aethlon: The Journal of Sports Literature. The author of The True Bones of My Life: Essays on the Fiction of Jim Harrison (Michigan State UP), he lives and writes in Quincy, Florida.

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