SOURCE: “Myth and Reality in Jim Harrison's Warlock,” in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, Vol. 25, No. 3, Spring, 1984, pp. 147-53.

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...