[In the following essay, Gilligan discusses Harrison's subtle and overt uses of mythology in Warlock.]

Jim Harrison's recent book, Warlock (1981), resists critical analysis because it is so obviously so many things at the same time. A sexy trip through the mythology of middle-age, it stops along the way to poke at art history (“The Great Gaugin would have had the girls back in his studio in a trice”) and at artists (“He dressed for a stroll, then endured the manic indecision of putting on and taking off the beret a dozen times”), at religion (“the god of the Brownian movement had stretched his loins otherwise”), at the social significance of food (“Many of the problems the world has had with Germany in the past century, he felt, could be traced to this leaden, fascistic diet”), and at American society (“nearly all of the huge institutions of the Midwest were not so much universities as jerrybuilt vocational centers providing bumwads for the economy”).¹ And Harrison finds time to comment on the humanity of used-car salesmen, the insensitivity of large dogs, the weather patterns of northern Michigan, the brotherhood of cops and the brotherhood of crooks, the oddities of sexual inversions and perversions, the dangers and pleasures of recreational drugs, the utilitarian differences between BMW's and Subaru station wagons, the varied effects of exercise and meditation, and the courage of late night talk show hosts to say nothing of any value. Harrison chooses not to develop many of the motifs he introduces, and he introduces a great many more than I have listed; and that tantalizing tendency to underplay much of what he presents and the humorous, irreverent manner in which he presents so many of the undeveloped motifs suggest how we should read those that he chooses to develop at length.² Kurt Vonnegut has, for years, gotten a great deal of mileage out of undeveloped motifs, recognizing that the attentive reader can fill in for himself most of the pedestrian fare that a less confident novelist would feel required to include.³ And Harrison, like Vonnegut, allows the small touches, the sharp but shallow thrusts, to set the tone of the novel and indicate how we are to view the large issues. We may find that ultimately the larger issues are not simply humorous and irreverent, but if we do not view, first, their humor and irreverence we may never understand what they really are. Take, for example, the pervasive references to classical and popular mythology.

Near the end of the book, as Johnny “Warlock” Lundgren patches up the problems of the previous pages, he joins his wife, Diana, on a nature walk, and as he kisses her he sees a motion in the bushes behind her that turns out to be his dog, but that elicits an important thought:

An idea entered his mind that nature walks would be more interesting if there were mythological guidebooks and you could find Toad and the great god Pan out in the forest.

(261)

And in a sense, Warlock is such a guidebook; but we have to be careful because Harrison is capable of lampooning even his most central themes. Consider the part of the fair Diana on which Warlock dwells the most:

For the first time in their seven years of marriage he did not stare at her beautiful bottom—oh gates of hell—when she got out of bed. And it wasn't that this particular bottom was framed by a foreshortened, satin slip nightie gotten mail order from Los Angeles; no, it was simply one of the best on earth, way up in that realm where comparisons are truly odious.

(4)

And again:

Those few who have seen her bending over nude to fetch her clothes are likely to remember it on their deathbed (sic) in their respective retirement colonies in Florida, Arizona, California.

(39)

Diana, pardon my pointing it out, was the Roman goddess of the moon.

And this sort of comic mythology pervades the book. Warlock drives Diana to work, a “Hermes” briefcase between them to deliver to her the message that he would seriously look for a job that day. His avante garde artist friend, Garth, builds “a huge painted plaster contraption called The New Leda that shows a swan doing what the title implies, “with Ralph Garth there in a railroad engineer's cap, and a can to oil the flanges” (31). Dr. Rabun is a “tall, knobby, saturnine figure,” (76) and when Warlock gets to know him they become “cronies” (111). Warlock sleeps with Aurora who proves much better than her name (after the Roman goddess of the dawn) might imply. He sleeps with Laura who, as Housman might have said, “withers,” for him, “quicker than a rose.” And he sleeps with Lucette, whose name is a diminutive of Lucinda, one of the names associated with the goddess Diana, indicating the girl is a poor substitute for the moon-goddess waiting at home. Laura, by the way, emphasizes her own connection with Diana and the whole series of classical allusions when she writes, in her put-on letter of farewell to Warlock, that she will recall the moments he shared with her when they “became one with the moon” (214). These references are funny rather than serious, and clever to the extent that tracing the connection of one mythological element after another becomes a game. And were they not funny, Harrison would be hard-pressed to justify including them because they are so unlikely, and a reader would be hard-pressed to justify picking them out because they are so obscure. The oblique references to mythology that occur in every important scene in the book become delightful, and necessarily deflating to the melodramatic seriousness with which Warlock views his situation.

Living his life on the strength of a dream, Warlock attributes real-world significance to the workings of the unconscious mind. He is an intellectual dabbler who sees little beyond surface values, and who rarely pursues an answer that does not appear to him quickly. As a child, we are told, “he always confused reality with realty, staring in silent confusion from the back of their two-tone '47 Chevy, as his father drove past a realty office” (72). As an adult, the dream on which he restructures his future could mean anything. He finds himself dead on the kitchen floor. But Diana deflates the significance of the dream immediately: “There's nothing on the kitchen floor but the tipped over garbage can. I think it's fair to presume the garbage can isn't you.” Eventually Harrison allows the deflation to take a mock-classic form:

If a Greek chorus had been present they would have been chanting, in effect: “Woe, a dream is not a map or manual, stupid. Woe, run to the church or psychiatrist. Head for the bar and your favorite beverage, kneel before womankind. Do not separate yourself. Join the army, get a job, help others. Do not act upon this dark secret. Woe, etc.”

(46)

But Warlock does act upon this dark dream-secret, ignoring both the pragmatic Diana and the advice of a mentor named Vergil—Vergil Schmidt, as it turns out—who tells him,

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)

And Vergil is right. Warlock, always willing to cross cultural boundaries in his fantastic reveries, becomes, at various times, a grail-knight crossing the Rubicon (119), an image of “Cain or Ishmael, at full roam” (142), and a hero “at the awesome crossroads” where he must “continue the quest or turn his back on it” an image from “the revived memory of a college mythology course” (144). And, of course, all of the postures are absurd, as Warlock almost allows himself to realize at times. And they seem all designed, however unconsciously on his part, to hide from him the reality of middle-age. The book spans exactly one calendar year in the life of a man turning forty-three, unable to cope with getting older, still dissipating his energies precisely as the sage Vergil had warned.

Warlock's attempts to cope with the continuing process of aging are childish in themselves and therefore indicative of his inability to grow significantly as a person. After posing for himself the sophomoric philosophical question, “How can the self measure the self?” a remnant from an old college ethics class, and recalling, in response to that question, the shallowness of a convention of wood stove dealers he had once attended where he had seen the depths of their shallowness (a seminar on the philosophy of woodburning pales next to a memory of his grandfather who “cut wood to keep the house warm because it was cold outside” (51), Warlock shows his own incredible capacity for shallowness by making a list of rules to govern his life-change:

Number One: Eat Sparingly

Number Two: Avoid Adultery

Number Three: Do Your Best in Everything

Number Four: Get in First Rate Shape.

(54)

But even these simple (-minded?) rules show Warlock to be a fool: each carries with it a deflation. “He thrummed the growing ring of lard around his waist. Writing this first rule made him feel thinner” (52). The second rule elicits lustful thoughts of Patty, “the Unemployment Office cheerleader,” and Harrison makes sure we see the point: “It seemed the act of making a coda defiled the spirit of the coda” (53). The third rule reminds Warlock that he is “fast becoming quite the cook” (54), even though we've seen him boil turkey soup down into something that resembles turkey gravy and fill a rutabaga with it, and even though on the following page we are introduced to ox-tail vegetable soup in which he “used perhaps a teaspoon of freshly grated horseradish in each of his bowls” (55). As he considers how to get in first rate shape, he falls asleep.

But the most pointed indication of Warlock's inability to deal in a reasonable manner with his growing older is his obsession with the life (but significantly not the art) of “the great Gaugin.”⁴ Certainly Gaugin's story can inspire the aging middle-class, those Norman Mailer once termed “the wad” and that Thoreau melodramatically said “lead lives of quiet desperation.” But Gaugin's story can only reasonably inspire a man to develop his own talent, which Warlock fails to do even as he becomes a financial success; and besides, the Gaugin story is so well-known that it has become, itself, a myth—cliché-ridden, oversimplified, and even a bit foolish, especially for a grown man to pattern his life on.

As readers, we will fail to grasp this book unless we recognize that Warlock's success has virtually nothing to do with himself. Pushed into a created job so that Rabun and Diana will be less inhibited, he stumbles upon (or more correctly is stumbled upon by—even the initial stumbling isn't Warlock's doing) a young forest ranger who shows him how Rabun's trees have been pilfered and thereby wins Warlock a large reward, paid in cash and confidence. Warlock stumbles across (his experience allows him to do his own stumbling), “quite by accident,” Gloria Rabun's gallery in Miami and Ted Rabun's charter boat in Key West, and as a result of meeting them both he makes a great deal of money by simply revealing what he knows about Rabun; and what he knows is simply that Rabun told him to get him out of town and away from Diana. Had he fallen for Ralph Garth's obvious ploys to get him away from Diana for a while, Warlock would have looked like a fool. The fact that he fell for Rabun's ploy instead and lucked into a great deal of money makes him no less a fool. In the only instance we see in which Warlock does not stumble upon what success he has, his inability as an investigator is made clear:

The case was simple: an audit had revealed a pathetically obvious kickback scheme where far too much was being paid for the raw lumber to make the shipping pallets.

(165)

But the case, it turns out, was not so simple—Warlock was. As the clearheaded Cletis points out to him after they have set-up and caught the crooked buyer, Warlock has failed to look any deeper than the surface:

“How do you know the plant manager wasn't involved? Or the accountants? That poor little shit will spend the holidays in jail taking a fall for the others. Use your head.”

(165)

Warlock's success depends upon luck, circumstance, ultimately coincidence. And Harrison realizes that coincidence, while it certainly occurs in the real world, is an element of fiction. Harrison even allows Warlock himself to understand what coincidence is, as he stumbles upon Mrs. Laura Fardel, who has been injured in Rabun's spa and who is suing:

The name Fardel lit up like a forty watt bulb as he made the drinks, then exploded in the manner of an unpunctured baked potato in a hot oven. Oh my god! His mind raced back to the coincidences found in Dr. Zhivago that last spring of graduate school. …

And Warlock shows his tendency to live according to the patterns he has studied:

… the palms became linden trees, the lowering tropical sun shown on the Baltic outside St. Petersburg, rather than the Atlantic off Palm Beach. Laura looked like Julie Christie, only better.

(198)

But such posturing, while funny, is vaguely pathetic, and it is meant to be both funny and pathetic because Harrison is aware that he is writing fiction and he wants us to recognize all the way through that only in fiction does the coincidental tie together so nicely at the end.

In the beginning of the book he shows us the absence of any novelistic connection between real-world events. Warlock was born, we are told, “December 11, 1937, at 12:11:37 A.M., the same time that a piece of meteorite killed an elephant in distant Tanzania, Hitler brushed his teeth with some vigor, Einstein yawned.” But when Harrison wants Warlock to find out about Diana's affair with Rabun, the coincidences within a single paragraph recall Dickens at his worst:

He called Clete because he somehow wanted to talk to Hudley, which wasn't possible. Clete said it was urgent that he call Patty. … Clete was a roamer, running into Patty at the selfsame bowling alley. Warlock contacted Patty and … was informed that her mother was Dr. Rabun's cleaning woman, and this selfsame Rabun was having a long-standing affair with Warlock's wife, Diana.

(242)

And the point of such obviously coincidental occurrences is precisely that fiction is not reality.

In one spot only, but in one spot undeniably, Harrison intrudes upon the narrative and admits to the non-reality of the novel. At the beginning of the eighth chapter he writes:

Who was this man? Or who is this man? As he is still very much alive and doing quite well. His wife Diana is also doing very well though she has an uncomfortably close call with death by gunshot wound in the confines of our story.

(39)

At the end of Tom Jones, or Pride and Prejudice, we can find such indications of how the story progresses beyond its own boundaries, but Fielding and Austen were well aware that they were writing for a readership that looked at their work as non-reality because the concept of realism as we know it had not yet been developed and they were not concerned with causing readers to suspend, as Coleridge put it, their tendency to disbelieve. The twentieth century reader, with a background of realism, looks to suspend his tendency to disbelieve and when he does, he becomes emotionally caught in a fictional story of which he can dismiss the reality when he is finished reading. The unique addition to literary art to come out of the mid-to-late twentieth century is the realization that the reader can receive a more powerful emotional jolt if he is not led to believe in the reality of the narrative but is made aware of the mechanics of the artwork as we are aware of the brush strokes in a painting or the chisel marks in a piece of sculpture.⁵

And ultimately, Warlock admits the unreality of its own mythological base. On the penultimate page, as Warlock walks through the potentially mythological forest with his ex-moon goddess wife, whose neck is emphasized now rather than her lunar regions, we are told that he was offered, and he refused, a new assignment. The tracking down of a rich-kid runaway who had joined, of course, the Moonies. A movement in the bushes turns out to be only Hadley, the dog, and the “mythological guidebooks” mentioned earlier would help very little anyway since Warlock's experience with Diana's field-study manuals have indicated to him that “nothing out in nature … resembled anything in the guidebooks.” And, although Warlock's recognition of the difference between Myth and reality may not be complete by the end of the book (since he does, in the final paragraph, consider again the possibility of hearing the piping of Pan), when the horn blows once more, indicating that Diana has found the car, that Pan is a fantasy, that Warlock has been misdirected, and that reality is not structured along the guidelines of myth, or of any art form, we, along with him, have “no real reason to doubt it” (262).

Notes

1. Jim Harrison, Warlock (New York: Delacorte, 1981), pp. 22, 187, 211, 122, and 126. All subsequent reference to Warlock will be to this edition and will be included within the text.

2. Harrison's best work, prior to Warlock, may well have been the novella entitled “Legends of the Fall”, which is so spare in spots that it resembles a plot outline but which succeeds, within eighty pages, in establishing the sort of multigenerational family biography to which James Michener might devote a thousand.

3. Consider the Kilgore Trout novels mentioned in Slaughterhouse-Five, (New York, 1969) The Gutless Wonder, for instance, allows Vonnegut to comment on man's greater concern for his immediate well-being than for the well-being of the race in general. The central figure of the book is reported to be a robot with bad breath who drops jellied gasoline on people for a living, and who is not accepted socially until he does something about his breath.

4. See, for example, pp. 21, 73, 87, 127, 179, 194, and 202.

5. This concept has been of central importance in the work of many of our most important writers. In addition to Vonnegut, who in Slaughterhouse-Five becomes a character in what he admits all along is a novel about real experience, consider how Joseph Heller plays around with time sequence in Catch-22 (New York, 1961) and how John Fowles shifts tense and person in Daniel Martin (Boston, 1977). Interestingly enough, the movies have recently taken to using the technique. The film version of Fowles' novel The French Lieutenant's Woman presents two parallel stories, one of which involves the supposed real lives of the actors who are playing roles in the other, thus emphasizing the non-reality of both stories. Of course, the stage has always admitted to being illusory by allowing even those characters who have died during the play to answer a curtain call. Heller, incidentally, tried to upset that tradition as well in We Bombed in New Haven (New York, 1967), in which actors supposedly do die for real.