Review: Heroic Deliverance
Author(s): Richard Patrick
Source: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Winter, 1971), pp. 190-192
Published by: Duke University Press
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NOVELJWINTER
1971
Heroic Deliverance
JAMES DICKEY, Deliverance
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), pp. 278, $5.95.
In speaking of "a new kind of art, where things are reduced to essentials-like in cave
painting-and there's none of this frou-frou," one of the two heroes of Deliverance
seems to describe its writer's aims as well as his own life style. Not that this is a new kind
of novel: it is a contemporary tale of heroic adventure in the tradition of Gilgamesh, The
Odyssey, Beowulf, as well as The Leatherstocking Tales and perhaps the "thrillers" of
John Buchan. For his first novel Dickey has returned to ancient common ground between
novel and epic poem-elemental narrative full of violent, improbable action such as,
E. M. Forster tells us, kept the cave man entranced round his fire waiting to hear what
happened next. An appropriate reversion, too, since this novel and its characters attempt
to reduce vitiating modern complexities to essentials, paralyzing ambiguities to certitudes. The first epigraph, from Georges Bataille, points in this direction and signals the
theme: II existe a la base de la vie humaine, un principe d'insuffisance. Structurally a like
simplicity operates. The first chapter establishes two strongly conflicting views of what
is real; the central three chapters recount the Experience itself, which becomes a crucible
for testing these views; and the last chapter constitutes a resolution of inner conflict, the
lasting upshot of the trial by ordeal. In short, the tale suggests the nature of our modern
insuffisance and relates the heroes' deliverance from it.
The story is simple and swift, reduced to essentials. Lewis Medlock leads three companions canoeing down the Cahulawassee, a river none of them had seen, in wild mountainous back-country. It is soon to be dammed up to create an artificial lake, and Lewis is
eager to light out for the territory "before the real estate people get hold of it and make
it over into one of their heavens." The first day is exhilarating, but with signs of unexpected violence. On the second day, however, Ed Gentry-the narrator-and Bobby
Trippe are set upon by a pair of seedy hillbillies with a shotgun, and Bobby is brutally
raped. Gentry is saved only when Lewis-a champion archer-brings down one of the
attackers with an arrow. The other flees, later to hunt the four from the top of a deep
gorge the river runs through. Drew Ballinger is killed, Lewis' leg is shattered, Bobby
goes more or less to pieces. Deliverance, from the increasingly violent river and from
their hunter, depends upon Gentry. He must scale the two-hundred-foot wall of the
gorge by moonlight, ambush his enemy and kill him with a single reliable arrow. Then
there are the worst rapids of the Cahulawassee to be negotiated and, finally, a backcountry sheriff and his venomous deputy to be outwitted.
In all this violent action the meaning turns on the characters of the men, especially on
the hard-edged contrast between Lewis and Gentry. At the outset Gentry's feelings are
ambivalent: he admires Lewis, the only man he knows "determined to get something
out of life who had both the means and the will to do it." Yet like "pleasantly cynical"
Bobby, he resists taking Lewis too seriously in his mystique of survival, which is his way
of cutting through modern complexities and subtleties of identity and purpose. "Life is
so fucked-up now and so complicated," he says, "that I wouldn't mind if it came
down, right quick, to the bare survival of who was ready to survive." To this end he is
slightly fanatical about keeping in shape, for "the body is the one thing you can't fake."
City men like himself and Gentry, he claims, because they lack the savvy and perhaps
REVIEWSIHEROIC
DELIVERANCE
ig9
the courage and stamina to survive in the woods, are "lesser men" than the ignorant,
backward hill-folk. But if Lewis is haunted by a need for certitude, for some ultimate
and irreducible test, Gentry is not, is indeed a bit scornful about the other's "fantasy."
Gentry's life is marked by absence of rigor, by evasions of any serious challenges. His
graphics studio is staffed with men who have been East and have not made it, have
returned to where the living is easy and competition slight. He lives by "sliding," which
is "finding a modest thing you can do and then greasing that thing."
Yet if these two differ, they are similarly different from Bobby and Drew, who, Gentry
sees, "were day-to-day happy enough; they were not bored in the way Lewis and I were
bored." Presumably they do not feel that insuffisance at the base of their lives, that
ennui and lassitude of spirit which betokens modern despair in the face of meaningless,
obliterating death. Though there is no talk of existential Angst or absurdity or alienation-"I don't read books and I have no theories," says Gentry-Nietzschean
taedium
vitae vitiates their lives. Lewis does not lack will-to-power, but he is desperate for an
object for his force. Reasonably happy, reasonably successful, Gentry can still be caught
in a moment of suffocating panic at his office when he realizes the "inconsequence" of
anything he might usefully do in a few vacant minutes. He calls it "the old mortal,
helpless, time-terrified human feeling," which makes him feel "impotent as a ghost,
going through the only motions it has." And something of the same imminent despair
sounds in his reply to Lewis' theory of survival: "What you've got is a fantasy life."
"That's all anybody has got," Lewis argues. "It depends on how strong your fantasy is,
and ... whether you measure up to what you've fantasized." Life may not be real to
Lewis, but it's earnest. For Gentry, if he does not somehow "live up to the equipment,"
the trip will be "as sad a joke as everything else." Yet he too has his fantasy; he seeks
an essential fulfillment in the gold fleck of a model's eye, shining "not with the practicality of sex, so necessary to its survival, but the promise of it that promised other things,
another life, deliverance."
Lewis is proved by the action of the novel to be right, and Gentry comes to reject
Bobby as a weakling and to take Lewis very seriously indeed. The ordeal provides a
lasting core of sufficiency to their lives: Lewis is no longer haunted by his mortality, no
longer driven by his will (his archer's "release is passing over into Zen"); and for Gentry,
the river now underlies everything he does, having put him in some right relation with
himself and the world. He has returned to making collages, presumably the expression
of an integrated self, and has relinquished his gold-flecked fantasy of sexual transcendence in favor of his wife's "practical" sex. Deliverance, then, has been from several
dangers, the deepest of which is explicit in the epigraph from Bataille: temptation to
surrender to the tedium and soporific passivity in contemporary American life which is
kin to a covert death-yearning suggested in the description of Gentry's habitual sinking, dreamless sleep. And in this sense deliverance is also something of a symbolic
birth, as coming fully into life, and the tale itself a rite de passage for men approaching
the banks and shoals of middle age.
This novel is not without its problems. All the voices in it sound much the same, and
there is an important contradiction, I think, in showing Lewis to be right about "measuring up" yet wrong in judging Gentry a "lesser man" than his hillbilly enemies, for his
brilliant successes call into question Lewis' romantic critique of urban life. Verisimili-
192
NOVEL WINTER 1971
tude, in language and in the careful establishment of milieu, invites the sort of imaginative belief that the romance-adventure taxes again and again. Gentry's heroics in getting
up two-hundred feet of rock-face almost purely by touch call to mind Natty Bumppo's
following a cannonball's track through the fog-or worse, Twain's response to it.
But a more serious problem, I think, has to do with the general purport of the novel,
which suggests not only Lewis' reduction of real philosophical complexities to simple
physical solutions, but a positive infatuation with violence, an easy acceptance and justification of killing. Having slain the first hillbilly, he is jubilant and insouciant (you don't
get a chance every weekend to put an arrow through a man). Yet at the end Gentry notes
egregiously that Lewis "is a human being, and a good one." And this metrics of violence
has been there from the beginning: giving brief sketches of Bobby and Drew, the narrator closes in both cases by recalling the only times he had seen them really angry.
After his adventure Gentry remarks how the river-embodiment of "incredible brutality and violence"-underlies his new collages, one of which is "full of sinuous forms
threading among headlines of war and student strikes." We recall Drew's son, Pope,
whose disfigured face would "make you realize the true horrors of biology," and the
mess of chicken heads in the river. Has Gentry's penetration to the dark heart of things,
to the "essentials" of "incredible brutality and violence," brought some fundamental
resolution, freed him from feeling "impotent as a ghost"? Lewis' way is presented as a
legitimate solution to the ennui, the soul's lassitude in modern life. It is all reminiscent
of that Nietzschean vision which so easily divides the Strong and the Weak, noble
aggressive lords (Lewis, Gentry) and impotent rancorous slaves (Bobby), and celebrates
robust health and power (Lewis' Herculean nakedness in the river) and its need for
expression. If Lewis and Gentry recall Natty Bumppo, they remind us also of Lawrence's
conclusion about that myth-hero: "the essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic,
and a killer."
Deliverance is, however, as its editors claim, a tour de force, and that may give Dickey
the last word. As a tale of high adventure it succeeds by the compelling momentum ot
the narrative. Whatever our uneasiness in retrospect, it holds us like Forster's cave man
while we read, and that excitement may argue persuasively for the persistence of essential appetites beneath all our frou-frou. I take it that is what the second epigraph is
all about:
The pride of thine hearthath deceivedthee
Thou that dwelleth in the clefts of the rock,
Whose habitationis high; that saith in his heart,
Who shall bringme down to the ground?
Obadiah, verse 3
RICHARD PATRICK, Brown
University
For the past few years, Richard Patrick has been an Editorial Assistant of
NOVEL. He brought to us an unusual critical sensitivity as well as the wit
and delight in literature that his review in this issue reflects. Richard Patrick
died suddenly 12 December 1970, and the Editors deeply mourn the loss of
this splendid colleague and friend.