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.
