Wilderness as Salvation in Peterson’s The Canyons of Grace (1984)

E U G E N E E N G L A N D Brigham Young University Wilderness as Salvation in Peterson’s The Canyons of Grace The American “errand into the wilderness” has both Hebraic and Hellenistic roots. But in western American literature the Greek Arcadian hope for earthly, bodily salvation has been more dominant than the Jewish and Christian sense of wilderness as both refuge and challenge for the soul, the placc both prophets and chosen people flee to but where terrible dangers abide. Emerson and Thoreau, importing the Romantic “spirit of the age,” created a new, optimistic religion from that Hellenistic hope for mortal paradise — and Whitman became its prophet. Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville (and Dickinson in much of her work) resisted the optimism, finding, in the forest and on the ocean, powerful places indeed to test the soul’s faith and morality, but places of no certain salvation. Most writers about the western wilderness have followed Emerson and Whitman more than Hawthorne and Dickinson. Some, from Rolvaag to Guthrie to Gass, and critics like Yvor Winters1and Robert Scholes,2have sensed the dark side of westering, the moral and spiritual (as well as physical) hardships of the frontier and early pioneering. But Levi Peterson’s fiction is appar­ ently the first so fully to explore for the American West the ancient myth of wilderness as context for explicitly religious trial and decision:it provides challenging new perspectives on the old debate — in which Peterson has also participated as a scholar — over the values and dangers of wilderness. Peterson’s success in his fiction seems partly due to his also being the first to do as a Mormon what Flannery O’Connor has done as a Catholic: write imaginative and skillful visions of the possibilities and paradoxes of his theology — as opposed to local color, the problems and tensions of Mormon history and culture, the mere regionalism of Vardis Fisher, 18 Western American Literature Virginia Sorensen, and Maurine Whipple.3 He shows us more directly than anyone else4what Mormons can feel and think in the extremities of their fundamental Mormon beliefs — especially about the central issues of wilderness and freedom as opposed to God’s control and grace in the matter of human salvation. Peterson’s first collection, then, published in 1982 in the distinguished series, “Illinois Short Fiction,” from the Uni­ versity of Illinois Press, provides not only some of the best Mormon fiction yet but a landmark in western literature. Three of the stories deal directly (though variously) with the encoun­ ter of humans with literal wilderness — as a place both to flee from God and to find Him, however reluctantly. (The other three, which I will not discuss, explore the same paradox in more metaphorical terms, the “wilder­ ness” as the waste places of sin and guilt within and as intractable human cussedness.) The book’s title, The Canyons of Grace, immediately estab­ lishes the central theme and suggests the central question: Are the wilder­ ness canyons a source of divine grace — or merely of human or natural grace? And the stories have titles that thrust us immediately into theo­ logical concerns: “The Confessions of Augustine,” “Trinity,” “Road to Damascus,” “The Shriveprice,” “The Christianizing of Coburn Heights,” “The Canyons of Grace.” But each title comes to be ironic as we discover that its traditional Christian associations are undercut by human contra­ dictions. The first story, “The Confessions of Augustine,” explores both the illusion of wilderness as escape from God and the experience of wilderness as the place of an overwhelming encounter with divine grace that “saves” the protagonist but leaves him beaten down, destroyed in will — and still yearning for his lost freedom. The narrator, Fremont Dunham, forced to reflect on such an experience in his own life by reading Augustine, states the ancient conflict of flesh and spirit, of freedom and obedience, in uniquely Mormon terms: Joseph Smith said that, in the beginning, there was inchoate matter and there were intelligences. One of these intelligences was superior, and He became God. He organized matter and made stars, suns, and worlds. He gave spiritual bodies to other intelligences, and they became His children in the pre...