Ed Trippin': Narrative Tension in James' Dickey's Deliverance

Spoiler Alert: This review is more analysis than review and it assumes that you are familiar with all the details of the novel.

At first glance, James Dickey’s Deliverance appears to be a part of the traditional tales of man versus nature in which socialized man pits himself against raw nature in order to find some deep truth about human nature.  Like Lord of the Flies, Dickey’s narrative shows us man, stripped of society’s rules and requirements, revealing the violent and bestial impulses lurking just beneath the veneer of civility. The ongoing question of course is whether social codes improve our lives or serve only to smother some essential part of our beings.  Lewis Medlock, the instigator behind the weekend-long canoe trip that is at the center of Dickey’s novel, believes that modern man’s distance from nature and his primitive instincts alienates him from what life is really about, that society strangles us with proper behavior, killing a piece of our soul.  On their drive out to the Cahulawassee river, Lewis explains his philosophy to Ed Gentry, our narrator: 

I think the machines are going to fail, and a few men are going to take to the hills and start over.  . . . At times I get the feeling that I can’t wait.  Life is so fucked-up now, and so complicated, that I wouldn’t mind it if came down, right quick, to the bare survival of who was ready to survive.

When Ed suggests that Lewis head to the mountains and live like a survivalist if that’s what he wants, Lewis counters that doing so would merely be “eccentric”:  “Survival depends—well, it depends on having to survive.  The kind of life I’m talking about depends on its being the last chance.  The very last of it all.”  Lewis would welcome the chance to slough off the dirty skin of society and live simply and honestly, even imagining that in the new world his wife would create “a new kind of art, where things are reduced to essentials—like cave paintings—and there’s none of this frou-frou art anymore.” 

As we have come to expect, the problems with the modern world are coded in Deliverance as feminine.  Art today is “frou-frou,” which is a frilly dress, all ornamentation, no substance.  Before the canoe trip, Ed finds himself surrounded on the street by women, and looking around at them he is “filled” with “desolation.”  On the morning of his trip, Ed lies in bed with his wife and expresses to her his dissatisfaction with his working life.  She asks if she is somehow at fault for his unhappiness.  He responds:  “’Lord no,’ I said, but it partly was, just as it’s any woman’s fault who represents normalcy.”  So what’s the best way to escape this feminine world with all its feminine restrictions and boring, stifling requirements?  A weekend out with men doing manly things, of course.

If you’ve read my post about Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, you know exactly how little patience I have for this kind of narrative and this ridiculously chauvinistic view of the world.  And if Dickey had told a tale about a man finding his manly self as he lets loose his primal scream in the woods, I would have had no patience for Deliverance.  But instead, Dickey creates something magical, and he does so by putting his story into the first person narration of Ed Gentry.  That story of the girly-modern man who becomes a capital-M real Man is precisely the story that Ed thinks he’s telling, but his bizarre language and obsessions with sex, intimacy, and becoming one with nature give us an entirely different perspective.

In Ed’s mind, he comes to the river as Lewis’s student, and after nearly getting raped and “having to survive,” he becomes his own man.  Once Lewis breaks his thighbone and is unable to take the lead, Ed fills his shoes.  He starts giving the orders to Bobby as he develops the plan: “I walked up and down on that little sandbar, for that should have been my privilege,” he says, claiming his rights as man.  From that moment on, he draws on primal energy: “Then for some reason I stepped into the edge of the river.  In a way, I guess, I wanted to get a renewed feel of all the elements present.”  He gathers strength from the rocks and power from the trees in the scenes that follow.  Whereas before, he couldn’t bring himself to shoot a deer, he will go on from here to shoot a man.  He’ll out-Lewis Lewis by creating a story for the authorities.  Lewis himself tells Ed, “You’re doing it exactly right; you’re doing it better than I could do.”  Go, Ed!  The student has become the master.  His cunning and manliness allow him to escape all danger brought to him by society and he returns home to be “less bored” than before.  His business thrives and he begins to create art in addition to his work.  To Ed, this is a story of triumph, and he is his own hero.

Woo-wee, do I love a first-person narrative!  We are all blind to our own desires, and Ed undermines his story at every turn, which is what raises Deliverance above what it would otherwise be.  Ed is obsessed with two things: first, the desire to be at one with nature or something greater than himself, and second, sex.  And for Ed, these two desires become linked and he is struggling with what he wants and how he sees the world.  We are given a glimpse of this complicated struggle just before the canoe trip, when Ed is having sex with his wife, Martha, who is face down before him:  

It was the heat of another person around me, the moving heat, that brought the image up.  The girl from the studio threw back her hair and clasped her breast, and in the center of Martha’s heaving and expertly working back, the gold eye shone, not with the practicality of sex, so necessary to its survival, but the promise of it that promised other things, another life, deliverance.  

So there he is, having sex with his wife, and he pictures another woman, but he focuses not on her clasped breast, but on the golden mote in her eye which is erotic precisely because it is not about sex at all, but about the thing that sex always promises, an escape from the mundane, the deliverance that gives the novel its title.  So during sex he thinks about the thing that is not sex in order to enjoy the sex that he is having while thinking about not having it.  How beautifully convoluted and vexed is that?!  By the end of the story, that golden promise of deliverance has been transferred from the model to the river, where he had more sex that simultaneously was and was not sex.

Sex is all over the canoe trip.  The obvious example is of course the rape of Bobby and the near-rape of Ed.  That scene is the one thing that everyone knows about the novel.  Before I read the novel, I imagined it was the climax (no pun intended), the horror to cap off a horrifying weekend in the woods.  I was surprised to see that it is the inciting incident, the moment from which everything else springs.  What struck me most about the scene was the utter absurdity of it.  The rapists are given no motivation at all.  These two men are walking through the woods, see these two city slickers, exchange a few words with them, then, without any discussion between themselves, get to tying up Ed and raping Bobby.  It is weird.  Really weird.   It is effective, of course, because it horrifies the audience—it’s why everyone knows about Deliverance in the first place--but more importantly it is the center of Ed’s complicated relationship with sex.  Sex is supposed to be a moment of deliverance, as seen in the passage earlier quoted, but it is always bound up with power and pre-shaped gender roles.  It is no accident that the one sex scene we have between a man and a woman has the woman bent over a pillow, receiving sex from behind, exactly as Bobby is raped at gunpoint.  It is also no accident that Lewis shoots his arrow through the rapist’s back.  The arrow, Lewis’s not-so-symbolic penis, penetrates the man from behind just as the rapist penetrated Bobby.  To complete this association, Ed, who was almost made to perform oral sex on the toothless man, later shoots that same man (or the man he thinks is that same man) in the throat, putting his own arrow/penis through his would-be rapists throat.  Sex, power, and violence become all entangled for Ed, and he doesn’t know how to untangle them.

What forces that tangle into a Gordian Knot is Ed’s wish for connection.  In thinking about the man he is about to kill, the man whom he thinks tried to rape him, Ed reflects:   

If Lewis had not shot his companion, he and I would have made a kind of love, painful and terrifying to me, in some dreadful way pleasurable to him, but we would have been together in the flesh, there on the floor of the woods, and it was strange to think of it.

There is a note of longing in Ed’s reflection, terror and longing co-existing, offering a promise of intimacy, of being together but at the price of pain.  Not coincidentally, the natural world interacts with Ed in his narrative in very sexual ways.  On his way up the cliff side to kill or be killed, Ed describes his motion this way:   

Then I would begin to try to inch upward again, moving with the most intimate motions of my body, motions I had never dared use with Martha, or with any other human woman.  Fear and a kind of enormous moon-blazing sexuality lifted me millimeter by millimeter.

As Ed fucks the mountainside, sex and fear and intimacy are all mixing together, and the combined effect is a sort of elation for Ed.  This is the golden mote that replaces the model’s eye for him.  And as he fuck nature, so nature fucks him.  When he crashes into the river after his rope breaks, Ed narrates, “I yelled a tremendous walled-in yell, and then I felt the current thread through me . . . up my rectum and out my mouth.”  Yelling like Bobby yelled, Ed is sodomized by the water.  But instead of wounding him, the river’s sodomizing has healing properties:  “It had been so many years since I had been really hurt that the feeling was almost luxurious.”

Again and again, Ed uses sexual terms to describe things that are not sexual.  He pees on himself while climbing up the cliff, and the urine “ran with a delicious sexual voiding like a wet dream.”  He takes deep admiration in Lewis’s physique when they go skinny dipping, and when Lewis breaks his leg, Ed pulls Lewis’s pants down and feels the wound:  “Against the back of my hand his penis stirred with pain.”  And as he describe what happens beneath his hand it is unclear if he is talking about the wound or the penis:  “there was a great profound human swelling under my hand.”  When he removes the arrow that has pierced his side, he first tries to pull the arrow through the wound.  Once the arrow is stuck, he notes, “I licked my hand and put saliva on the shaft, hoping the lubrication would help,” which reads a lot more like masturbation than first aid.

The thing that makes the novel so riveting is the way that Ed (and I would think to some extent Dickey himself) is incapable of bringing oneness, sex, violence, and power into a harmonious relationship.  He cannot conceive of connection without violence resulting from a power imbalance, even as connection is what he desperately desires.  He draws strength from trees and rocks and water, but just as frequently those symbols of nature are symbolically fucked by him and fuck him in return.  Pleasure and freedom are bound up with blood and pain, and try as he might, Ed cannot separate them.  And Ed, through his narration, never shows an awareness of all these warring desires.  He thinks he is telling one narrative, as Dickey tells us another.  It is a masterful use of the first-person narration, and it is the compounding of this narrative tension with the tensions of plot that make this an unforgettable and brilliant novel.

The Two Sides of Maria

*Spoilers lounge in this post like drugged out starlets in a producer’s Hollywood home: read on at your own peril*

Maria, the protagonist of Joan Didion’s 1970 novel Play It as It Lays, starred in two films directed by her husband Carter Lang early in their relationship.  The first was an artistic film called Maria, never released, though it “won a prize at a festival in Eastern Europe.”  It consists of documentary-like footage of Maria going through her days.  The second film was a commercially released film called Angel Beach, about a girl, played by Maria, who is raped by a motorcycle gang.  At the end of it, the girl is a survivor, “strolling across a campus.”  Maria dislikes the first film and is uncomfortable sitting through viewings of it.  She doesn’t like being the subject of all the gazes and thoughts of the (predominantly male) audience.  But as for the second film, “she liked watching the picture: the girl on the screen seemed to have a definite knack for controlling her own destiny.”

It is not, I believe, mere chance that led Didion to make these two movies central to Maria’s acting career, for they act as the two narrative poles in Play It as It Lays.  The novel consists of dozens of short chapters that play out as individual vignettes through which we follow Maria’s emotional journey from her splitting with Carter to BZ’s suicide.  In the structure, and in third person narration, we are treated to something resembling Maria, the film.  We are forced to experience her exchanges with the people in her life from the outside, kept at a cool distance by the under-emotional narrator.  We are seldom allowed into Maria’s thoughts.  As Maria herself dislikes the first film, so I have some difficulty with this aspect of the novel.  Didion writes with beauty and power, but the long suffering of Maria threatens to cross over from interesting and moving to trying and unsympathetic.  And like Carter’s film, Didion’s novel threatens to become overly artsy at these moments.  What keeps the novel from becoming an empty and pretentious piece is Didion’s integration of a strong character and plot, elements found in Maria’s second film, Angel Beach.

Like the character she played in that film, Maria is a survivor.  In her own words, she is a player, and we see this Maria most clearly in the opening and ending of the novel.  Although the novel is primarily narrated in the third person, the novel begins with a chapter in Maria’s voice.  In that chapter, the longest in the book, we see Maria’s intellect, insight, and strength.  She is a wary and wounded soul, but there is something fierce and touching as well.  It is easy to forget this strong character as the novel wears on and we, even as we follow her closely, are kept at an arm’s length.  But as the novel nears its conclusion, we once again get a smattering of chapters written in first person, and we see Maria’s character contrasted with BZ.  Carter and Helene have been impatient with and dismissive of Maria throughout the novel, seeing her as acting out of a desire for attention and faking her symptoms.  She is considered weak and uncontrollable, a danger to Carter’s career.  Moreover, her faults seem particularly tied to her gender—her weeping and semi-hysterical behavior.  So it surprising when BZ, whom we knew would die but knew not how, is the one who swallows a handful of pills to slip into the darkness.  The signs have been there, of course, when we look back, but he had none of what came across as the histrionics that Maria displays.  In BZ’s suicide, Didion makes it clear that Maria is neither alone nor weak.  We are reminded of the determined Maria of the opening chapter, and as she lies in the bed with BZ holding his hand and comforting him on his last journey, we are also reminded of the thing that keeps Maria going in spite of her difficulties: Kate.  With BZ, Maria is comforting, understanding, and maternal.

By bringing together the two narrative styles of Maria and Angel Beach in Play It as It Lays, Didion creates a strong and moving tale.  It is both beautifully written and delicately plotted.  Generally, I’m not a fan of books and films about people who feel dead inside because they tend to be pretentious and sacrifice character to the atmosphere of ennui.  Didion’s novel works precisely because character and plot are always central to the novel, even as it explores the dark absence at the center of Maria’s existence.

What Every Girl Should Know

*Spoilers Ahead*

Having never been a pubescent or pre-pubescent girl in the 1970s and 1980s, I did not grow up reading Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.  I do remember it being passed around and discussed in hushed whispers somewhere in my childhood, but I never picked the book up to read it until two days ago.  Now I am a 43 year old man, and while I have a teenage child, he is a son and not a daughter, so my interest in Blume’s landmark novel is above all else literary.

Are You There God? is really a fantastic book for two reasons.  The first is the sharpness and clarity of the writing.  To some that may sound silly, since all children’s books are written with simple sentences and direct statements, but when done by a strong writer (like Blume, or Dahl, or L’Engle) the sentences have a rhythm and poetry of their own that aligns them closer to Hemingway and Vonnegut than to other children’s books.  The sentences are deceptively simple, saying much more than the individual words would suggest, packing complex meaning into the commonest language.  It reads, in short, like a stylistic choice rather than a conventional necessity.

The second reason, and the one that really blew me away, was the plot and arc of the story.  As someone who has been exposed to children’s stories for over 40 years, I kept thinking that I knew what was going to happen as Margaret journeyed through her sixth grade year in her new town.  Ah, I said to myself, she will discover that Nancy is rather a nasty person and will find a new set of friends, learning that we must choose our friends for the content of their character.  Ah, she will discover that Philip Leroy, no matter how cute he is, is a louse and that Norman Fishbein, whom she thought was a drip, actually treats her well and is a much better partner for her, learning that we can’t judge people by our first impression.  Ah, she will learn that Laura Danker isn’t stuck up at all, that she is a victim of a system that harms her as much as it does Margaret herself, that girls and women should not be judged by their appearances.  Ah, she will learn that what is most important in religion is one’s personal relationship with one’s deity and not the external trappings of religious services.  Ah, she will learn that her continued desire to be “normal” is a waste of time, that she should be able to accept who she is and let her body grow at its natural pace.

The amazing thing is that none—not one—of these things happens, at least not in any conclusive way.  When I finished the last page, I was at first disappointed, thinking that Blume failed to wrap up a few of her threads.  Then I realized that she failed to wrap up any and all of her threads!  When Margaret wrongfully attacks Laura and realizes that she has hurt Laura’s feelings, she feels rotten.  In her prayers that night she calls herself “the most horrible person who ever lived.”  And then . . . that’s the end of Laura’s role in the novel.  There is no reconciliation.  There is no scene in which Margaret and Laura become friends.  There is no scene in which Margaret defends Laura’s honor by correcting Nancy the next time she says something nasty about Laura.  That’s amazing!  Any other author would feel the need to wrap it up and have the moral spelled out for her young audience.  But not Blume.  There is an incredible trust that she puts in the intelligence and thoughtfulness of her young readers that is beautiful and inspiring.

Laura is just one of many examples of this respect that Blume feels for her reader.  Nancy is revealed to be a liar, and Margaret learns that Nancy can’t be trusted like she thought, but she doesn’t dump Nancy as a friend.  Margaret has learned her lesson and moves on to the next one.  Philip Leroy is pretty awful, and Margaret finally decides that Nancy can have him because Margaret is through with him, but that doesn’t mean she’s running to Norman, who’s nice enough to her and has a crush on her.  We don’t get that closure because life doesn’t have that kind of closure, especially not for a twelve year old.  The same thing happens in Margaret’s religious search.  Nothing gets settled.  Nothing.  Her possible reunion with her mother’s parents is thwarted by their pigheadedness, and her father’s mother is no religious hero, trying just as much to convert young Margaret.

There are dozens of life lessons in this book, but not one moral.  There is not one moment that Blume has Margaret say, “I get it!  I should just be who I am!”  And yet, I bet that nearly every girl that has read this book has understood Nancy’s faults, Philips’s shortcomings, Norman’s redeeming qualities, Laura’s mistreatment, Gretchen’s potentially damaging focus on weight, and Margaret’s double-edged desire to fit in.  What Blume captures here is life and human desires and leaves it all in the hands of her capable readers.  Blume tackles enormous topics like religion and sexuality with ease and moving beauty.  As an adult reading it, I can both ache for Margaret’s ill-placed obsession with hitting puberty even as I understand that that obsession is itself normal.

Our culture is skewed towards telling narratives about young boys who learn what it is to be a man, and not nearly enough stories about the life of young girls.  It is no wonder that young girls flocked to Blume to see common lives of other young women portrayed with humor, love, and empathy.  I love that the first image we get in the novel is of Margaret’s mother sniffing her own armpit to see if her deodorant is working.  From the get go, Blume is telling us that femininity is not going to be cloaked in any kind of glamour.  Women have bodies that aren’t sex objects, but are subjects that stink and bleed.  In the novel, we see mom brushing her teeth and leaning into a cupboard with her butt sticking out and being no different from her husband.  The one sexualized grown woman in the novel is the Playboy centerfold, and that is another moment that Blume offers without comment.  We are allowed to laugh and moan inside and respond how we will.   In an adult novel, that treatment is to be expected (or at least hoped for) but in a children’s novel, it is very rare.  If I had a daughter, I would have every one of Blume’s books on the shelf waiting for her to discover them when she was ready.  I wish now that I had had them on the shelf for my son to find as he was growing up too.

Celebrating the Three-Quarters Mark!

After nearly four years of reading, I have finally reached the three-quarters mark on this list of 100 best English-language fiction novels written between 1923 and 2006.  In November of 2013, I began book number 51 on the chronological list, James Agee’s A Death in the Family, published in 1958.  Philip K. Dick’s Ubik, number 75, is the last book on the list published in the ‘60s, which means nearly a quarter of the hundred books were published in the 1960s.  And it was a hell of a decade for fiction—I have given out more 5-star reviews in this quarter than in any of the two quarters preceding it.  There were a ton of fantastic reads, but as I have done at the previous landmark moments, I will give you my own best-of list (in chronological order):

• John Barth’s The Sot Weed Factor
• Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird
• Joseph Heller’s Catch-22
• Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire
• Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook
• Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird
• Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49
• Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five

In the interest of keeping the list short, I chose novels that I think anyone would enjoy, but there were a whole set of novels that I loved but that I think have particular tastes associated with them.  These are:

• James Agee’s A Death in the Family
• Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
• V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas
• Saul Bellow’s Herzog
• Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea
• William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner
• John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Wife

There were several novels that were very well written but that didn’t resonate with me or that I found problematic politically or philosophically:

• John Updike’s Rabbit, Run
• Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
• Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange
• Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint

There was only one novel that I thought the prose itself was unimpressive, even as the story was wonderful, and that was Philip K. Dick’s Ubik.  There were only a handful of sentences that I felt rose above the functional to express something beautiful or profound in a beautiful way.  The story was wonderful and the writing was fine, but the prose was not nearly as impressive as the other writer’s on this list.

And now it’s time to forge ahead into the final 25 books on the list.  I expect I’ll get there sometime in the middle of 2016.  But for now, it’s on to a book that I have never read, but that nearly every pubescent and pre-pubescent girl in the ‘70s and ‘80s read: Judy Bloom’s Are You There God?  It’s Me, Margaret.