Casting Shadows: Filial Enactments in A River Runs Through It

Set in western Montana in the early decades of the century, Norman Maclean's lyrical and often laconic memoir engages two mysteries. The one is the wonder of geological nature—prehistoric raindrops recorded in the rocks, glaciers that crack open the earth for seething rivers; the other is the far more baffling mystery of the human family with much narrower cracks and its early history overlaid with sediments of repression. Bridging as well as complicating these two worlds is Norman's father, a Presbyterian minister. “In our family,” Maclean writes, “there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing” (1). Between attending Sunday morning and evening services, Norman and his three-years-younger brother Paul would stroll the hills with their father, reciting the catechism and hearing previews of the upcoming sermon. But because their father was certain that “all good things—trout as well as eternal salvation—come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy,” their childhood was filled with as many hours of fly-casting as of religious instruction: “he would hold his rod straight in front of him, where it trembled with the beating of his heart…. wrapped with red and blue silk thread… carefully spaced to make the delicate rod powerful but not so stiff it could not tremble” (Maclean 5, 2). Thus, with a four-count rhythm between ten and two o'clock on the metronome, began the lessons, which, despite their sexual undercurrents, were conducted as a parable of fallen man struggling with his natural powers to achieve grace. The ample brown trout that filled their baskets became palpable proof of the sons' redemption through the graceful mastery of fly-casting.

Although Norman would later realize his father was not a “great fly-caster,” he reflexively exalts Paul as “master of an art,” a “great artist,” and situates him on their “family river” in