Embracing the Fall: Reconfiguring Redemption in Jim Harrison’s The Woman Lit by Fireflies, Dalva, and The Road Home

Abstract

E m b ra c in g t h e F a l l : R e c o n f ig u r in g R edem ption in Jim H a r r i s o n ’s T h e W o m a n L i t b y F ir e f l ie s , D a l v a , a n d T h e R o a d H o m e T o d d F. D a v i s a n d K e n n e t h W o m a c k When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. — Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things” Every shred and ounce of nature equals mortality. We must not stand up to this but absorb it. — Jim Harrison, The Road Home In much of his poetry and fiction, Jim Harrison works against the broader cultural ethic of dualism, frequently presenting us with charac­ ters in the midst of life-altering struggles that in some way relate to an unhealthy participation in the structures of American life.1 Harrison’s critique of those structures cannot be characterized as facile, however; nor should we assume that his characters or Harrison himself have managed to divorce themselves completely from the broader cultural influences that all too often lead not only to personal crisis but to a larger environmental predicament that mirrors our own spiritual malaise. In Wolf (1971), his first novel, Harrison chronicles the midlife crisis of Swanson, a man who enters the deep forests of the Huron Mountains in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in an attempt to make sense of his life. This structure— a man in midlife facing the existential dilemma of his own mortality and finding, if not answers, a form of consolation in the natural landscape— surfaces time and again in 134 WAL 3 8 .2 SUMMER 2 0 0 3 Harrison’s work. In subsequent volumes, such as Legends of the Fall (1979), Warlock (1981), and Sundog (1984), Harrison describes the encounters of men who have become estranged from their place in the natural order and who return to the wilderness to rediscover and reconnect with what might best be called a sacred attentiveness. Some crit­ ics accuse Harrison of an exclusive male focus, a gender bias that imitates the work of writers like Hemingway, whose male characters stride into the forest to be healed by the touch of moss and fern, the play of a fish at the end of a line. When we look more closely at Harrison’s body of work, however, we begin to see the influence of what he describes in “First Person Female” as “the female umbrella” under which he grew up (99). Harrison suggests that writing in the voice of a woman has saved him from death by “drugs and booze” because “man­ liness in our culture can paint you into a comer” (101). Deeply con­ nected to dreams, Harrison often remarks that Dalva is his twin, and their separation at birth— a Jungian notion later taken up by James Hillman— represents a more fluid idea about gender, one that tran­ scends simple concepts about biology and accounts for Harrison’s remarkable passion for his female narrators. The extraordinary way of seeing the world that Harrison returns to in so many of his poems and novels— a not so distant relation to Emerson’s notion of transcendence— is not gender exclusive in Harrison’s conception. Rather, this attentiveness allows his characters to open their minds, regardless of gender, to the radiant life that exists beyond the borders of their cities and to see how all living things are interconnected. Time and again, he depicts the lives of men and— in later works such as Dalva (1988), The...