Introduction: Necessary Negotiations

Notes Introduction: Necessary Negotiations 1. In Kurt Vonnegut’s Crusade, Or, How a Postmodern Harlequin Preached a New Kind of Humanism (2006), Todd F. Davis contends that “although many postmodern philosophers see the effects of poststructuralism’s critique of essence and centrality as an opportunity for negative freedom or endless play, there exists among the masses a reluctance to embrace the postmodern....Instead, we find large groups of people calling for a return to traditional morality, for a belief in the spiritual or mystical. Sadly, at times these groups find the clarity they seek in the company of fascists, racists, and warmongers. In our own country we have seen the tragic consequences of Charles Manson, Jim Jones, and David Koresh, while witnessing the growth of the religious right promul- gated by such leaders as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. Not surprisingly, the New Age movement, including the growing furor surrounding angels and astrology and the practice of witchcraft known as Wicca, has been consistently exploited by tabloid television. The sweeping success of the likes of Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh—as they confidently tell their listeners in no uncertain terms what is right and what is wrong with the political and social sphere in the United States—certainly indicates the seductive appeal of the demagogue to those who wish to have, as Ihab Hassan puts it, meaning anchored” (23). See also Terry Eagleton’s chapter, “Revolution, Foundations, and Fundamentalists,” in After Theory (2003). 2. As we suggested in Formalist Criticism and Reader-Response Theory (2002), “the critic wears scholarly lenses that cause certain elements of a literary work to rise from the page, similar to the shift that occurs when one views an image with 3-D glasses” (37). To be sure, these lenses comprised or are polished from the materials of theory, but when theory begins to limit the vision of the critic, keeping important sections of a text out of sight, then the hybrid nature of humanity is lost. What makes us most interesting (and, we would contend, healthiest) as readers and writers of a story is our mixed nature, the amalgamation of all that we have experienced distilled into the act of telling and interpreting. 3. Related to the idea of subjectivity and objectivity is the role that religion plays in the act of interpretation and meaning-making. In Telling Stories: Postmodernism and the Invalidation of Traditional Narrative (1995), Michael Roemer offers a shrewd observation about the “gods” that structure and con- trol our everyday living. “Many of us no longer believe in an all-knowing, just, and loving deity,” Roemer remarks. “But we also tend to think that all the gods are dead, though their names may have simply changed to biology, history, economics, culture, the unconscious, grammar, and chance. They don’t know we exist, but determine our lives as completely as the gods of old” (353). 4. As critics, we do not offer allegiance to any one form of theory, but we have made use of such forms of theoretical practice as family-systems 166 Notes 167 psychology, ecocriticism, feminism, Marxism, reader-response theory, for- malism, tropology, narratology, ethical criticism, myth criticism, and postmodernism. 1 Embracing the Fall: Reconfiguring Redemption in Jim Harrison’s The Woman Lit by Firef lies, Dalva, and The Road Home 1. In a revealing passage from his long poem, After Ikkyü, Harrison reflects on the current spiritual state of his culture and the political and theological leaders whom he loathes. The speaker in the poem faces a crisis of sorts but looks to the Christ he knew in his youth and the Buddha he follows now, both of whom admonish him to “pay attention,” a form of sacred attentiveness: The World is wrenched on her pivot, shivering. Politicians and Preachers are standing on their heads, shitting out of their mouths. Lucky for us Stephen Mitchell has restored the Gospels, returning the Jesus I imagined at fourteen, offering up my clumsy life in a damp shroud of hormones. Most of all he said “pay attention,” Buddha nodding from the wings. (45) 2. We are told in a later passage that for Clare’s husband “the world itself was a marketing possibility” (214). As they drive through Iowa, Donald com- ments that local acreage prices are recovering from the 1985 downturn, and Clare remembers his worry that the black walnut tree in their yard— “worth seven thousand bucks as furniture veneer” (215)—might be cut down by lumber thieves while they are away on vacation. Donald cannot see beyond the seductive realm of the financial world to some other form of worth, a fact that injures Clare’s psyche and leads to the dissolution of their marriage. 3. Harrison appears to adhere to Emerson’s notion that stasis is nothing more than another kind of death, that spiritual truth may only be experienced by recognizing that it can never be captured in language. Clare’s own experi- ence echoes a passage in “Nature” when Emerson asks, “Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour and is not reminded of the flux of all things?” (32). 4. For further discussion of Harrison’s conception of landscape as it relates to one’s spiritual centeredness, see Todd F. Davis’s “A Spiritual Topography: Northern Michigan in the Poetry of Jim Harrison.” Remarkably, the paucity of published criticism regarding Harrison’s work—despite his considerable popular and crit- ical success—has neglected to explore his significant narrative examinations of the environment and its ethical interrelationship with humankind. 5. In an interview with Salon Magazine, Harrison further describes the process of becoming Dalva and her subsequent return during his writing of The Road Home. “I didn’t have her—she had me,” Harrison explains. “I actually dreamed her. She was on the porch in Santa Monica, longing for home. I even saw her naked in a dream, and it was quite overpowering. There’s something 168 Notes frightening about finding a woman who would take your heart.” See also Harrison’s own essay about writing in the voice of a woman, “First Person Female.” 6. Harrison actually uses Claremont’s statement in The Road Home, offering up himself—“an admittedly goofy poet”—as the object of deprecation. In a sec- tion of the novel narrated by Naomi, we are told that in the spring of 1986 Dalva sent her an essay “by some admittedly goofy poet she cared for that said that reality is an accretion of the perceptions of all creatures, not just us. The idea made my poor brain creak in expansion like a barn roof as the morning sun heats up” (314). 7. While it falls outside the scope of this chapter, in much of Harrison’s work he clearly laments what we have done to the land and to the people who thrived upon it before its colonization. Such convictions clearly play a significant role in Dalva’s grief; the past atrocities that her great grandfather witnessed are among the ghosts that haunt her. As with Gary Snyder, who writes in Earth House Hold (1968) that “something is always eating at the American heart like acid: it is the knowledge of what we have done to our continent, and the American Indian” (119), Harrison also sees our treatment of Native Americans as “our curse on the House of Atreus. They’re our doom. The way we killed them is also what’s killing us now. Greed” (Fergus 81). As Harrison reveals in Just Before Dark (1991), his interest in Native Americans and their many and diverse cultures is based on moral distinctions that he sadly believes many in our country simply are ignoring: “Native Americans are an obsession of mine, totally unshared by New York or Los Angeles for the average reason of moral vacuum” (22). 2 Writing Back through the Body: The Communion of Flesh and Spirit in the Work of Mary Swander 1. In The Country of Language (1999), Scott Russell Sanders explains that we “treat with care what we love, and we love only what we have truly learned to see, with all our senses alert” (24). Ironically, as Swander’s own body shut down in certain ways, her senses became even more alert, and her depend- ence upon other forms and ways of living became much more significant. To survive, she had to be cognizant about her own body and the bodies (ani- mals and plants) that might not only save her but sustain her as well. 2. In her acknowledgment—or better said, in her celebration—of the mysteri- ous nature of the body, of its sacredness, Swander’s vision seems similar to that of Annie Dillard’s. In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), Dillard consistently works to fuse the mystical traditions of the spiritual world with the scientific traditions of the natural world. Dillard proclaims that physicists “are once again mystics” and that “all this means is that the physical world as we understand it now is more like the touch-and-go creek world I see than it is like the abiding world of which the mountains seem to speak” (204). Like Dillard, Swander progresses in her understanding of her own body and its connections to all other things by studying the natural world and the ways in which scientific and religious insights inform the manner in which we approach the natural world. Notes 169 3. In Writing from the Center (1995), Sanders claims that “no matter where we live, the energy of creation flows in each of us, every second.

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