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

Abstract

In much of his poetry and fiction, Jim Harrison works against the broader cultural ethic of dualism, frequently presenting us with characters 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 spiritual malaise. Standing on the precipice of an ecological void, Harrison’s characters attempt to transcend their own malaise by engaging nature on its most primal levels.

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