SOURCE: “Jim Harrison, Soul-Maker,” in Midwest Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 2, Winter, 2000, pp. 191-207.

[In the following essay, McClintock gives examples of the influences of psychologist James Hillman and poet John Keats on Harrison's writing.]

The jackets on Jim Harrison's books used to note that he lives in northern Michigan and “is a keen fisherman” and “bird hunter.” They don't now, not even for a work like his collection of essays, Just Before Dark (1991), a third of which is devoted to outdoor sport. The change is wise because Harrison's novels, novellas, poems, and essays have never been merely neo-realist narratives about adventurous men; nevertheless, they have been unfairly criticized for being macho derivatives of Hemingway. That criticism has diminished since Dalva (1988), “The Woman Lit By Fireflies” (1990), and “Julip” (1994), all narratives of women's lives.

Harrison's works, in fact, have always been as much about the interior life of men—and, now, of women—as the external life of action. Harrison has consistently explored the workings of imagination, the nature of consciousness, and the mystery of personality, developing his art in the service of what post-Jungian psychologist James Hillman, and before him the poet John Keats, called “soul-making.” Hillman, an American who spent nearly twenty years at the Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland, began publishing his major works in the mid-seventies. His psychological views about creativity and the connections among imagination, imagery, dreams, and the soul have aided Harrison in shaping and articulating his own literary vision and life's work.

Explicit references to Hillman's ideas begin as early as 1981 in Warlock, part two of which has an epigraph from Hillman's The Dream and the Underworld: “There is an imagination below the earth that abounds in animal forms, that revels and makes music” (117). Thereafter, Harrison mentions Hillman by name on the first page of Sundog (1984), in Dalva (122), and in a number of essays, most notably “Fording and Dread” ([Just before] Dark, 1982; 258, 259), “Passacaglia on Getting Lost” (Dark, 1986, 252), and “From the Dalva Notebooks, 1985–87” (Dark, 1988, 285). Furthermore, Harrison alludes to Hillman's ideas in nearly every work from “The Man Who Gave Up His Name” (1980) to “Julip” (1994).

Allusions to a Keats passage signifies the commonality between Jim Harrison's literature and James Hillman's psychology. Hillman quotes that passage frequently as capturing the purview of his “archetypal psychology” (Blue Fire, 6); and Harrison alludes to the same passage in a number of works, quoting it in “The Beige Dolorosa” (Julip, 248). In a letter to his brother, Keats wrote, “Call the world if you please, ‘The vale of Soul-making.’ Then you will find out the use of the world” (Re-Visioning, xv).

For Hillman, the soul refers to “that unknown human factor which turns events into experiences,” investing the ordinary with significance. It is “the imaginative possibility in our natures … that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic.” Hillman says of soul that it is “a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself” (Archetypal Psych, 16–17). Not the Christian idea of soul, Hillman's conception is interchangeable with the Greek “psyche” and Latin “anima,” a mediator between matter and spirit, body and mind (Re-Visioning, xvi).

The making of soul, Hillman writes, “calls for dreaming, fantasying [sic], imaging” because “in the beginning is the image; first imagination then perception; first fantasy then reality” (Re-Visioning, 23). The psychologist's views about access to and development of soul through imaginative acts are, therefore, close to ideas of what writers do, especially since Hillman believes that imagined figures and persons are personifications of powers of the psyche, the soul. “In dreams, we are visited by the daimones, nymphs, heroes, and Gods shaped like our friends of last evening,” Hillman writes (Dreams, 61–62). The courage to attend to such dreams, to participate in soul-making, is for Hillman synonymous with the novelist's courage:

Entering one's interior story takes a courage similar to starting a novel. We have to engage with persons whose autonomy may radically alter, even dominate our thoughts and feeling. … It is a rare courage that submits to this middle region of psychic reality where the supposed surety of fact and illusion of fiction exchange their clothes.

(Healing, 54–55, in Blue, 49)

The challenge to do this is so great, Hillman often asserts, that writers (and others) suffer from depression and turn for relief to obsessive drinking, eating, and sexual encounters, exercising “Herculean” efforts to dominate their surroundings. These are familiar problems in Harrison's autobiographical writing; and they are prominent in his fiction and poetry. Harrison's troubled male protagonists often try to overcome painful experience through obsessive drinking, womanizing, eating, hunting and fishing—masculine pursuits that readers and reviewers have believed epitomize Harrison's major interests.

But readers who consider Harrison's portrayals Hemingwayesque in romanticizing masculine adventurers, are wrong. As William H. Roberson has argued convincingly, “Harrison's protagonists may aspire to the ‘tough guy’ image … [but] they are characters constantly questioning themselves, their lives, their purposes … and any pretense at macho is more an example of their own narcissism … than any reflection of male dominance” (241).

Harrison's failed-macho characters seek to lose themselves by trying to master their problems heroically. Their failures, ironically, are directly proportional to their tenacity in trying to dominate their “dayworld” lives (the common sense world of daily activities); they desperately need to give themselves over to the process of soul-making that occurs while dreaming and when opening to the indeterminate possibilities of dream images. Encouraged by many forces in American culture, men and women divorce themselves from reality, Hillman argues, by trying to achieve full control over circumstances. Ironically, they experience “loss of soul”; “All particular functions of ego-consciousness operate as before; associating, remembering, perceiving, feeling, and thinking are unimpaired. But one's conviction in oneself as a person and the sense of reality of the world have departed” (Re-Visioning, 44).

Certainly, this is true for failed artist, then unsuccessful foundation executive, Johnny “Warlock” Ludgren, in Warlock. Here is a mock-macho, fumbling, private detective who drives a four-cylinder Subaru rather than a black Trans Am, experiences terror in the woods of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and is a would-be ladies' man whose sexual imagination is shaped by his stack of Playboy, Oui, and Penthouse magazines (30). In this comic novel, Warlock is so self-preoccupied, sitting for hours thinking at the kitchen table, that his wife, Diana, sneaks up behind him and screams, “Leave yourself alone!” (154). Good advice, Hillman would say. Warlock needs to plunge into the underworld through dreaming, where roles and personae are neither simple nor culturally determined.

Harrison's invitation for us to read the novel from that perspective is offered in the epigraphs to each of the novel's two sections which draw attention to Hillman's The Dream and the Underworld (1979) and emphasize Hillman's major premise that soul-making is associated with dreams and a bottomless downward movement. Quoting A Midsummer Night's Dream exactly as Hillman has edited the same passage, Harrison opens Warlock with the Shakespearean epigraph for the Dream and the Underworld:

I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was: man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream. … The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. … It shall be called “Bottom's Dream,” because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the latter end of a play … to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death.

The second epigraph in Warlock, a direct quotation from Hillman's book, mentions the downward movement again but emphasizes imagination's role: “There is an imagination below the earth that abounds in animal forms, that revels and makes music” (117). In addition, and underscoring the importance to Harrison of archetypal psychology, the companion epigraph to The Dream and the Underworld is from Carl G. Jung's Psychology and Alchemy: “The dread and resistance which every natural human being experiences when it comes to delving too deeply into himself is, at bottom, the fear of the journey to Hades.”

Dread accounts for macho (Herculean) avoidance, but one must engage death (understood metaphorically) by taking the dream bridge to the underworld, to Hades, if soul-making is to occur. According to Hillman, the archetypal, mythic, transpersonal experience in those dreams has a salutary effect on our lives: because “We move from dream to … joyfulness” (132). In Warlock, Harrison engages these ideas with a brilliantly comic use of myth.

By alluding to Hillman's first chapter of The Dream and the Underworld, “The Bridge,” Harrison reveals that his character, Warlock, without knowing, is embarking on a soul-making journey. As Warlock crosses the Mackinac Bridge to Michigan's Upper Peninsula, it seems to him a path over “some sort of holy Rubicon,” an experience which resonates with an earlier dream; and the novel's narrator tells us that Warlock “did not know that the bridge of dreams is the bridge downward, and that in entering this terrain of sleep he had ruffled the ghastly feathers of the strange gods” (119).

Harrison's comic use of the many mythic elements in Warlock deflates the “melodramatic seriousness with which Warlock views his situation” (Gilligan, 149). Eventually Warlock grows away from his life-long confusion between the “day-world” of personal self or ego and the dream-infused world of the soul-making self. At first Warlock had tried to control and change his life “heroically,” vowing to live by simple rules:

Number One: Eat Sparingly
Number Two: Avoid Adultery
Number Three: Do Your best in Everything
Number Four: Get in First Rate Shape.

(54)

He had quickly and repeatedly failed to follow any of the rules. Warlock needs to heed the admonition of his mentor—significantly named Vergil—who gives advice Hillman might give about abandoning efforts to control one's life: “You don't live in the actual world. You live in a far inferior world where you dissipate all your energies making the world conform to your wishes” (75).

Ultimately, Warlock silences his obsessional concern with Self by crossing the bridge that draws him downward into the rich and potent world of his interior life, the world of personified images, of myth, of material for soul-making. We learn with Warlock that “beneath the slick and sophisticated surface of American life the old nature gods still exercise their capricious power” (Treadwell, 225). Thus the novel ends joyfully, with human wishes in concert with nature. Warlock confidently heads in the right direction after hearing the goddess of this hunt's horn (his wife Diana's car horn). The horn sounds to Warlock like Pan piping; the night world has invigorated his day world experience. Harrison's and Hillman's point is that “the surety of fact and illusion of fiction [have] exchange[d] clothes” during soul-making.

That exchange between fact and fiction is apparent even in the title of Harrison's next novel directly influenced by Hillman's ideas: Sundog, a Novel, The Story of an American Foreman, Robert Corvus Strang, as Told to Jim Harrison (1984).

In Sundog a fictional Jim Harrison is a depressed novelist whose work has deteriorated to writing a book about game cookery and who has found that “gluttony, alcohol, painkillers … didn't work anymore” (xii; while discussing Sundog, I will refer to the fictional character as “Jim Harrison” and the author as “Harrison”). In this enervated state, Jim Harrison is invited to write about “someone who has actually done something,” Robert Corvus Strang, an extraordinary hydraulic engineer who builds dams for irrigation systems in third world countries (xi). Sundog consists of taped interviews with Strang and of protagonist Jim Harrison's comments upon Strang's process of self-healing. Strang had injured leg nerves in a fall from a dam, a problem compounded by physical and mental effects of an Indian herbal medication he had taken since childhood for epilepsy. These problems not only parallel the fictional Jim Harrison's “nerves” and alcohol abuse, they are problems the living Harrison faced while writing this novel. In “Fording and Dread,” Harrison portrays himself as resembling the novel's Jim Harrison. During four months alone in an Upper Peninsula Michigan cabin, the setting for Sundog, Harrison had notes for the novel but nothing written, as he worried about “lost energy and interest,” wanting freedom from “dread, alcohol, gluttony, habits of all sorts” and wondering if “the character [Strang] I'm inventing is the one I wish to become” (Dark, 257). Strang's overarching motivation is to continue his work, the problem both the fictional and real life Harrisons confront. The question is, Harrison says in “Fording and Dread,” “How does one regenerate?” Sundog seeks the answer. The protagonist Jim Harrison says in the aptly titled first section, “Author's Note” (the living Jim Harrison, inevitably present), that the Strang writing project began “the rather nagging and painful beginning for me of a long voyage back toward Earth” (xi).

James Hillman is on the mind of both Jim Harrisons. The novel's opening paragraph mentions Hillman: “The contemporary mage James Hillman has told us that the notion that there is a light at the end of the tunnel has mostly been a boon to pharmaceutical companies,” referring to Hillman's contention that efforts at soul-making through therapy or other efforts, including Christian dogmas such as the resurrection, cannot obliterate depression (Sundog, ix; Inter Views, 19–21). There is no final cure for suffering and no fixed point of rest; “fluidity and grace are all” (ix; Inter Views, 17). Author Harrison learned this lesson and found an answer to his question, “How does one regenerate?” when he stopped taking notes for Sundog and “read the galleys of the new James Hillman book,” Healing Fictions (Dark, 258).

Healing Fictions—like Sundog, a Novel, The Story of an American Foreman, Robert Corvus Strang, as Told to Jim Harrison—is a title with multiple meanings: narratives that heal people and the healing of narratives, both applicable to Sundog. The book's underlying themes are that “our reality is created through our fictions; to be conscious of these fictions is to gain creative access to, and participation in, the poetics or making of our psyche or soul-life” (George Quasha, “Preface,” ix). And Harrison must have been struck by Hillman's assertion in Healing Fictions that “the act of turning to imagination is not an act of introspection: it is a negative capability, a willful suspension of disbelief in [one's works of the imagination] and belief in oneself as their author” (58–59). That, we know, for Hillman and Harrison both, is the ground for soul-making. “According to Hillman,” Harrison writes, “our main guide is the story we have already collected and written for ourselves” (Dark, 258). It does no good, Harrison continues, to “hammer at our psyches as if they were tract houses” in order to avoid painful emotions and assure “self-improvement,” using an idea Harrison attributes to Hillman and a phrase he puts in the mouth of the character Jim Harrison in Sundog (18). Harrison learns from Hillman that “dread and all her improbabilities are an inevitability we must make our lover” (Dark, 260).

Strang does make dread his lover. Rather than avoiding his pain by drinking compulsively and womanizing, he embraces it. His therapy is to crawl for miles through difficult terrain and, later, day after day, to swim in a river's cold waters, even at night, periodically telling his story, his fiction, to Jim Harrison. Strang's disease and disability, in Hillman's view, does not indicate something essentially wrong with him. On the contrary, “whatever appears wounded, sick, or dying may be understood as that content leading … into the House of Hades,” a sign of the soul's necessary movement into the realm of psyche in the process of soul-making (Dream, 146–47). There, images—not ideas or words—are the language of soul; Strang has a waking night-time experience when “all my thoughts illustrated themselves by vividly colored pictures” (213; Archetypal Psych, 6).

Strang, clearly, is a soul-maker. His story is a healing fiction which emphasizes two symbolic foci: women and the river. Too complex to discuss fully here, I will comment only on the symbols' basic thematic implications for Sundog. Women and the river are linked imaginatively, if not logically. This is first indicated when Strang's daughter, Evelyn, tells Jim Harrison early that information about Strang's illnesses and physical limitations isn't helpful compared with paying attention to what Strang calls “the theory and practice of rivers” and knowing that Strang “understands women better than any man I have ever known” (5). The unfolding of Strang's tale that becomes Sundog details his insights derived from relations with women and his theory and practice of rivers.

There are many women: Strang's childhood friend, Edith; his nurse-lover in Africa; Violet his sister-mother; and Eulia, his adopted daughter who seems his lover. They, in the aggregate, are the voices of his anima, which express what lies below his story and complete it. Of his love for the nurse, Strang says “it was a frightening love that I embraced,” the answer in some measure to the question “someone asked, ‘What have you done with the twin that was given us when we were given our soul?’” (164). “Someone” was James Hillman, whom Harrison says is “an unbelievably brillant [sic] man” who helped him understand that the male artist must have a highly developed feminine aspect (Dark, 259; “Art of Fiction,” 73). The twin-anima figure, a favorite among Harrison's symbols, has a meaning so rich for him that he ends Just Before Dark with a poem to her, the mysterious secret sharer of his soul who is met in dreams that “dream myself back to what I lost, and continue to lose and regain, to an earth where I am a fellow creature and to a landscape I can call HOME”:

Who is the other,
this secret sharer
Who directs the hand
that twists the heart,
the voice calling out to me
between feather and stone
the hour before dawn?

(317)

These women, faces of the anima, which personify the soul's powers of the imagination, even the soul itself (Re-Vision, 43), are fittingly associated with Strang's “theory and practice of rivers,” which, of course, is the title of Harrison's own poem published five years after Sundog. Hillman writes that “Anima means both psyche and soul, and we meet her in her numerous embodiments as soul of waters without whom we dry …” (Re-Visioning, 42).

Rivers give Strang “that incredible sweet feeling I once got from religion” as he gives himself over to psyche and soul-making (197). His life's work with hydrology, which had begun as an extension of his Christian evangelism, had led to a theory and practice of rivers related to the making of his own soul. Strang's last interview with Jim Harrison affirms connections between river symbolism, dreams, full consciousness, and soul-making:

Do you realize how unspeakably grand it was to come up to this cabin, the area of my youth, after that long in a hospital. … That's why I refused all those drugs after awhile. I had to be conscious. That's all. How could I bear not being conscious? Last night I was swimming in the dark in my dreams and it was wonderful.

(235)

The novel's Jim Harrison thinks he is not yet ready to emulate Strang, admits that “I tried to imagine what it would be like to swim down a large river at night, but couldn't quite make it,” and turns in his imagination for a moment to a pornographically inspired fantasy “vision of a buttocks as big as the Ritz” (236–37, 240). Nevertheless, Jim Harrison has been in a significant way restored by his working relationship with Strang. The taping complete, packing his bags to leave, Jim Harrison reveals that he stopped to “reread Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces for the umpteenth time,” saying “There aren't any old myths, just new people,” referring of course to Strang as a journeying hero but as well to himself as one called to the vocation of writing (236). That calling for Harrison, the author, is understood as religious, and “the worst thing is the refusal of the call” (“Art of Fiction,” 92). The character Jim Harrison hears the call and begins the “long voyage back towards Earth.”

Harrison's long poem, “The Theory and Practice of Rivers,” integrates and elaborates the Jim Harrison and Robert Corvus Strang figures into a single speaker close to the writer Harrison. As well, it elaborates Hillman's ideas about waking the gods within. The poem's speaker, a poet, like Sundog's Jim Harrison, is “drowning in a bourgeois trough, a bourride or gruel of money, drugs, / whiskey, hotels, the dream coasts …” and has forgotten “what it was I liked / about life” (20, 24). He sits on the banks of an unnamed northern Michigan river, thinking through his pain, making his way eventually into the water and a healing process that will restore his will to live and power to create. Harrison's poem itself is “designed to waken sleeping gods,” for Hillman mythic personifications of the psyche (21).

Harrison experienced such integration in his own life, and expressed it in terms similar to those in “The Theory and Practice of Rivers” and Sundog. Recalling the traumas of an eye blinded in childhood, the deaths of his sister and father in a car accident, his young niece's death, his continuing financial and alcohol problems, ensuing psychoanalysis with Lawrence Sullivan, and dreams of many years—Harrison reports his own healing in language consonant with Hillman's language and concepts. In “Dream as a Metaphor of Survival,” Harrison writes:

Slowly, and mostly in my imagination, I had begun to swim in waters that sensible folks would readily drown in, mostly in the area of consensual reality. … Concurrently my work began to revolve around more ‘feminine’ subjects, the acquiring of new voices, and away from a concern with the “men at loose ends” that tends to characterize the fiction of most male writers.

(Dark, 312)

He discovers “the evident attempt of my dream life to relocate me, to protect me from an apparent fragility I tried to overcome with drugs and alcohol, the over dominance in my life of ‘manly’ pursuits. I no longer try to ‘guts out’ anything” (317).

After Sundog, not surprisingly, Harrison wrote three works with women protagonists: the novel Dalva (1988) and two novellas, “The Woman Lit By Fireflies” (1990) and “Julip” (1994). None is as directly and pervasively shaped by Hillman's works as Sundog, but all reflect his influence. For example, Michael, Dalva's misdirected lover, an alcoholic Stanford University historian, displays his spiritual blindness and inferiority to Dalva by making an acerbic remark about Hillman. After Dalva speculates about connections between her waking life and her dreams about Nebraska, Indians, and animals, Michael parades his erudition by lecturing about Freud, commenting on Otto Rank and Karen Horney, and “in the interest of winning the point” deliberately overlooks “those irrational mushmouths Carl Jung and his contemporary camp follower, James Hillman” (122).

In many ways, Dalva is an answer to Hillman's question, “What have you done with the twin that was given us when we were given our soul?” Harrison, while writing the novel, noted that “Dalva is probably my twin sister who was taken away at birth” (Dark, 288). She is his psyche, the mysterious sharer of his soul that makes soul-making possible, whom he meets in dreams that “dream myself back to what I lost … to an earth where I am a fellow creature and to a landscape I can call HOME” (Dark, 317). “Going Home” is the title of the novel's third and final section, in which Dalva returns to the Nebraska prairie, the landscape of her family history.

The novel ends with reconciliation between Dalva and that place, between Dalva and her mixed-blood son whom she had given up for adoption at birth, and between the living and the dead. This last is especially important because she reconciles with a past that is the nation's “soul” history—another concept Harrison and Hillman share (Archetypal Psych, 26; Blue, 95–111, 166–92). In Dalva the white settlers' mistreatment of the Sioux is a cause of the nation's soul sickness. Dalva's family's history involved trying to help the Sioux but, ironically, prospering from Indian lands the family acquired. Some basis for reconciliation is symbolized by her great-great grandfather (whose Indian name, “Earth-diver,” alludes to Hillman's idea that in dreams we go “under the earth”) marrying a Sioux woman; Dalva, herself, having a child by her mixed-blood half-brother, Duane Stonehorse; Dalva's eventual reunion with her son; and her loving relationship with Sam Creekmouth (Re-Visioning, 33).

Of the other two works focused on women's consciousness, “The Woman Lit By Fireflies” owes most to Hillman. In it Clare, at fifty and on impulse, leaves her self-centered husband at a highway rest stop, climbs the fence into a corn field, and spends the night in memory and dream until “relocated” in relation to herself, nature, and others. The situation is archetypal: she makes an animal's lair—a “green cave”—for herself, builds a fire, and is interrupted from her dreams and reflections only by a companionable awareness of animals and birds nearby (a rabbit, opossum, cock pheasant) and in dreams (bear, horse). Animals and birds that come to her mind and imagination are “soul doctors” (Dream, 150). Harrison has frequently cited Hillman's remarks in Dream and the Underworld that animals are “carriers of soul … there to help us see in the dark” (Dream, 148; Dark, 285). Clare, whose veterinarian daughter observes that she behaves as if her spirit is detached from her body, comes back to her body, waking in the morning to a “green odor transmitting a sense she belonged to the earth as much as any living thing” (Woman [Lit By Fireflies], 237). Eventually, she feels blessed by “countless thousands of fireflies” surrounding her and, closing her eyes, “felt herself floating in memory from her beginning, as if on a river” (239–40). Having reached into herself to a level that transcends the personal, Clare is “at home.”

“The Beige Dolorosa,” in Julip, Harrison's most recent volume of novellas, is thoroughly indebted to Hillman's concept of “coming home” through a change in personality resulting from soul-making; and it can serve to summarize the impact of Hillman's ideas on Harrison's writings. The work's connections among dreaming as soulful activity, nature's creatures as soul doctors, and an eventual return to an acceptable ordinary life are consistently articulated with Hillman's ideas.

In this comic work, the first-person protagonist, a disgraced, minimally functioning, midwestern college English professor, is on forced leave, staying in a cabin on a small southeastern Arizona ranch. After a year's work on a paper-back edition of John Clare's poetry, he has managed to write only “Clare was Clare” on a three-by-five card (Julip, 199). His spiritual resources seem as minimal as his professional accomplishments.

The novella dramatizes the professor's change in personality, a spiritual renewal. Dreams are central to the novella. One “instructed me to walk the border of the forest and open land, and at the same time to rename the birds of North America,” which he suspects will develop a “taxonomy … based on the spiritual consequences of the natural world” (246; Harrison's identical dream is recorded in Dark, 316). Hillman argues that naming, as Adam named animals in Eden, is part of personification, of creating images and metaphors, that relate to others as “living psychic subjects,” not objects (Re-Visioning, 31–32). To rename the brown thrasher the “beige dolorosa,” is a spiritual decision for the protagonist for the richly metaphorical name suggests the sorrow and depression Hillman sees as a necessary prelude to entering the underworld and soul-making. The name remains the protagonist of a musical phrase from Mozart (the “Jupiter” symphony is mentioned earlier), “one that makes your heart pulse with mystery.…” Such mystery occurs when “you were exercising the glories of your negative capability and thus were plumb in the vale of soul-making.” Remaining in the “forest glade,” continuing to meditate on “Keats's notions of ‘the value of soul-making,’ which [he] had never properly understood,” the professor realizes that “I had been guilty like so many in controlling myself when there was nothing left to control.” He “tingle(s) with pleasure” as he understands fully that he is, at that very moment, in the “value of soul-making” (248).

Thereafter, he experiences that profound mystery in a series of encounters with birds—an unnamed warbler, dozens of tiny elf owls who speak to him, and the beige dolorosa itself, who peered up at him “as if I might be a tree” (252, 258, 257). The birds are signs of soul-healing, for here and elsewhere in both Hillman and Harrison birds are associated with angels on the one hand and words on the other, both bearing messages for the soul's nourishment (Blue, 28; Re-Visioning, 216; Archetypal Psych, 13–14; Dark, 260). Among the birds, the protagonist of “The Beige Dolorosa” is overcome by “feeling at home, whether I deserved to or not” (258–59), the same feeling of blessing Clare experienced in “The Woman Lit By Fireflies” (239) and which pervades the final scene of Dalva's “Book III, Going Home.”

Jim Harrison has often been misread as primarily concerned with the natural world—with fishing, hunting, eating, and sex. But that is a diminished and, finally, distorted view of his ambition and achievement. Both Jim Harrison and James Hillman envision the physical, natural world as crucial to spiritual growth. An understanding of Harrison's descriptions of the external world, especially nature, is more complex if it begins in Thomas Moore's characterization of Hillman's ideas about relationships between the material and spiritual—that “Soul is always tethered to life in the world” (Blue, 112). Harrison has said of his own life that immersion in nature has saved him from suicide. While that may be literally understood, it should be understood metaphorically as well, since “soul-making” takes place in “the vale of this world” when the ordinary ego dies. Significantly, both Harrison and Hillman allude to alchemy as a precursor to modern soul-making because alchemy was created to locate soul in the materials of this world (Blue, 55–56; Julip, 187).

Harrison's literary and spiritual vision insists that he explore the world in ways that evoke the images of a “common dream” that alters consciousness. Hillman writes that a faith that begins in the love of images and “flows mainly through the shapes of persons in reveries, fantasies, reflections, and imaginings,” gives one an “increasing conviction of having … an interior reality of deep significance transcending one's personal life” (Re-Visioning, 50). This is a faith that Jim Harrison has deepened through his art, a faith that his soul-making characters—Warlock, Strang, Dalva, Clare, the professor—come to experience. Jim Harrison's complex body of work, indebted in part to James Hillman's “archetypal psychology,” is reason to remember, in Hillman's language, that words are “carriers of soul between people” (Re-Visioning, 9). In turning our world into language, Harrison is, finally, fully engaged in exploring the nature of consciousness as the expression of, as well as site for, soul-making. As he has emphasized in many places, Harrison—quoting D. H. Lawrence this time—believes that the writer is “a hero of consciousness” (“The Art of Fiction,” 89).

Bibliography

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Harrison, Jim, Interview with Jim Fergus. “The Art of Fiction CIV.” Paris Review, 107 (1988). 53–97.

———. Dalva. New York: E.P. Dutton/Seymour Lawrence, 1988.

———. Julip Boston: Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence, 1994.

———. Just Before Dark, Collected Nonfiction by Jim Harrison. Livingston, Montana: Clark City Press, 1991.

———. Sundog. A Novel, The Story of an American Foreman, Robert Corvus Strang, as Told to Jim Harrison. New York: Pocket Books, 1984.

———. Selected & New Poems, 1961–1981. New York: Delta/Seymour Lawrence, 1982.

———. The Theory & Practice of Rivers and New Poems. Livingston, Montana: Clark City Press. 1989.

———. Warlock. New York: Delta/Seymour Lawrence, 1981.

———. Wolf. A False Memoir. New York: Delta/Seymour Lawrence, 1971.

———. The Woman Lit By Fireflies. Boston: Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence, 1990.

Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology, A Brief Account, Together with a Complete Checklist of Works by James Hillman. Dallas: Spring Publications, Inc., 1993.

———. A Blue Fire: Selected Writings by James Hillman. Introduced and edited by Thomas Moore in collaboration with the author. New York: Harper Perennial, 1989.

———. The Dream and the Underworld. New York: Harper Perennial, 1979.

———. Healing Fictions. Barryton, New York: Station Hill Press, 1983.

———. Inter Views: Conversations with James Hillman and Laura Pozzo on Therapy, Biography, Love, Soul, Dreams, Work, Imagination and the State of the Culture. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.

———. Re-Visioning Psychology. New York: Harper Perennial, 1976.

Robertson, William H. “‘Macho Mistake’: The Misrepresentation of Jim Harrison's Fiction.” Critique, 29:4 (1988), 233–44.

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