Title: Transformations of the Hero in James Dickey's Deliverance
Author(s): Ronald Schmitt
Publication Details: James Dickey Newsletter 8.1 (Fall 1991): p9-16.
Source: Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Linda Pavlovski. Vol. 151. Detroit: Gale,
2004. From Literature Resource Center.
Document Type: Critical essay
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning
[(essay date fall 1991) In the following essay, Schmitt maintains that Dickey provides an ironic
treatment of the mythical hero in his novel Deliverance.]
According to James Dickey himself, the source of the novel Deliverance was a 1949 review
essay in the Kenyon Review by Stanley Edgar Hyman which mentions both Joseph Campbell's
Hero With a Thousand Faces and Arnold Van Gennep's Les Rites de Passage (Eisiminger 53).
According to Hyman, "... as students of myth we must separate from the world, penetrate to a
source of knowledge, and return with whatever power of life-enhancement the truth may
contain" (qtd. in Eisiminger 53). Dickey himself documents his interest in myth and its
importance to modern man:
The parts of the universe we can investigate by means of machinery and scientific empirical
techniques we may understand better than our predecessors did, but we no longer know the
universe emotionally. It's a great deal easier to relate to the moon emotionally if the moon figures
in a kind of mythology which we have inherited, or maybe invented, than it is to relate to it as a
collocation of chemical properties. There's no moon goddess now. But when we believed there
was, then the moon was more important, maybe not scientifically, but more important
emotionally. It was something a man had a personal relationship to, instead of its being simply a
dead stone, a great ruined stone in the sky(Self-Interviews 67).
Such an interest in man's role in nature and identification with mythic concepts and patterns such
as those outlined by Campbell can be seen throughout Dickey's poetry as well as in the novel
Deliverance. Because of this fascination with nature in the midst of a technological world, many
critics assume that Dickey starts from nineteenth-century transcendentalist/romantic concerns
(Foust 201). His personal interests in camping and bow-hunting also contribute to the notion that
Deliverance is primarily a macho adventure novel which embraces such naive principles as
noble savagery and heroic survivalism.
However, for a number of critics, including me, the ironic components of Deliverance emerge as
clear indicators that, instead of creating a male fantasy of wilderness adventure, this novel is
involved in questioning the applicability of romantic conceptions of man's relationship with
nature in the modern world. Linda Wagner, recognizing the romantic relationship, says,
"Deliverance can be considered a kind of gothic, even bitter Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"
(112). The idea that man can, as Lewis Medlock believes, return to some difficult but ultimately
noble state of primitivism and again become one with nature is revealed as a lie in this novel. To
Dickey, the lie is important. He says:
But I really began to develop as a poet, at least according to my own particular way of looking at
things, when I saw the creative possibilities of the lie. My parents were very much against lying
in any form. But I think lying, with luck sublimely, is what the creative man does(Self 32).
As Chet Taylor points out, "deliverance is a lie; Deliverance is not" (63). What Deliverance (the
novel) does do is to create an unresolved and unresolvable tension between the seductive myth of
the heroic quest-romance to the cleansing and enlightening initiation of the wilderness, and
modern man's irreversibly civilized and mechanized state of alienation from the wilderness.
Dickey's many ironic treatments and reversals of romantic notions of the wilderness have been
observed by various critics. The notions of Nature as a "tender, feminine, submissive" force
subjected to man's rape (Love 182), the "primitive" forest dweller as more noble and moral than
civilized man (Taylor 59), and the survival of the fittest in nature (Davis 226) are all reversed in
Deliverance, thereby plunging the reader into a wilderness as fearsome as the one in the novel:
the wilderness of moral relativity. Nature, despite our best attempts at myth-making, has no
concern whatever with man's laws and moral principles. Man, now increasingly alienated from
any but peripheral contact with nature, finds his constructed illusions of order and meaning
shattered when he enters the wilderness. When man turns from the wasteland of his
mechanization to the wilderness, he often finds only another wasteland, one with which he is
now unfamiliar and in which he is even more alienated. While primal connections can be
revitalized and result in growth, there is no deliverance: from the city, from the wilderness, or
from ourselves. The myth of deliverance through wilderness adventure is, like the model which
haunts Ed's thoughts, "a pleasant part of the world, but minor. She is imaginary" (235).
I would like to suggest another ironic treatment, not of romanticism in this case, but of Dickey's
acknowledged source of Deliverance, Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces. Specifically, I
suggest that the characterizations of the four central figures in Deliverance--Ed, Lewis, Bobby,
and Drew--can be seen as ironic modern manifestations of Campbell's "transformations of the
hero," namely, the hero as warrior, the hero as lover, the hero as emperor/tyrant, and the hero as
world redeemer/saint (334-356). What is shown through these characterizations is the
impossibility of modern man's achieving cultural initiation, much less archetypal heroic status,
through the wilderness experience. The mythic rituals which modern technological man must
devise to define manhood and heroic status are necessarily different from previous cultures,
especially primitive, non-technological ones. We can no longer say that "the labyrinth is
thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero path" (Hero 25). Since our
everyday survival no longer depends on skills involving an intimate understanding of nature and
because our technological world grows ever more distant from the natural world, achieving an
autonomy unimaginable even one hundred years ago, our mythic quests for identity no longer
follow the path of the ancient mono-myth.
Lewis Medlock, the survivalist of the group and initiator of the canoe trip in Deliverance,
indicates his awareness of the schism between modern man's experiences and experiences of a
truly unadulterated wilderness:
If everything wasn't dead [he says], you could make a kind of life that wasn't out of touch with
everything, with the other forms of life. Where the seasons would mean something, would mean
everything. Where you could hunt as you needed to, and maybe do a little light farming and get
along. You'd die early, and you'd suffer, and your children would suffer, but you'd be in
touch(42).
Ed Gentry, the narrator, on the other hand, sees Lewis' survivalist beliefs as a "fantasy life" (46),
yet admits to being "so tanked up on your river-mystique that I'm sure I'll go through some
fantastic change as soon as I dig the paddle in the first time" (49). The desire for technological
man to "make a kind of life that [isn't] out of touch with everything" and renew the primal and
mythic connections with nature described above by Dickey's statements about the moon, is an
extremely seductive myth in its own right and one which he never discards in his writing as
entirely fallacious. Indeed, Dickey's own feelings about the characterization of Lewis represent
the simultaneous revulsion and attraction which Ed feels at the start of the novel. In an interview
with Bill Moyers, Dickey describes Lewis as "full of philosophical platitudes" and agrees with
Moyers that when Lewis says, "I think the machines are going to fail. I think the system is going
to fail, and a few men are going to take to the woods and start over," this is a "wish" of shallow
empowerment comparable to the violence perpetrated by "nothings" like Sarah Moore and Lee
Harvey Oswald (Dickey, Night (95). Yet, in an address given at the University of Virginia in
June 1973, Dickey indicates an ambivalence about Lewis' character:
As I originally conceived him, I wanted to make him a figure both attractive and a little repellent,
with his authoritarian manner and clear-cut bodily superiority to the other characters. But as I got
more deeply into the character of Lewis, an odd thing began to happen to the author. I began to
sympathize more and more with what Lewis was making me make him say. And what is even
stranger, I began to admire him tremendously(Dickey, Night 180).
Clearly, the argumentation between Ed and Lewis is an ongoing argument within Dickey (and
within many men in the modern world) between an attraction to the empowerment of the
survivalist's "preparedness" (Deliverance 44) and the intellectual realization of the elements of
fantasy inherent in such a myth.
Lewis is clearly the hero as warrior in Campbell's schema. It is the quest of this type of hero to
conquer the "tyrant" of the world which Campbell says represents the "status quo." Thus, "the
ogre-tyrant is the champion of the prodigious fact, the hero the champion of creative life" (Hero
337). The prodigious fact in Deliverance is the death of the wilderness represented by the
imminent flooding of the valley in which the Cahulawassee River runs, a flooding that will result
in what in the movie is described as "one big, dead lake." It is also, ironically, a form of man's
control and power over nature's forces. This control is clearly abhorrent to Lewis, despite the fact
that he also seeks control and power. The image of the map at the start of the novel, and Ed's
feeling that "all streams everywhere quit running" (7) when Lewis paused in explaining
something, is a brilliant metaphor for the survivalist's armchair illusions of control and power.
The brutal fact that all streams will soon quit flowing as a result of man's technology and not his
personal will is more than Lewis can bear.
So, as Campbell describes, the hero's adventure begins "only when villages and cities have
expanded over the land" and the monsters or tyrants which dwell beyond the village's outskirts
and prohibit the community's growth must be "cleared away" by the hero (337). The irony and
reversal in Deliverance, of course, is that the status quo has already won; the human community
has expanded so much that it eradicates the primal dangers which Lewis seeks out to test his
manhood and establish his identity.
Despite Lewis' greatest attempts at preparedness, he is shattered by the wilderness experience he
initiates. While it is true that his one act of heroism, the killing of the first mountain man, saves
the lives of Ed and Bobby, the act, rather than establishing his heroic status, must be hidden and
remain a perpetual secret among the men. Lewis returns to society "a great, broken thing" (182)
with a permanent limp. Referring to the canoe in which he has lain, useless and a burden to the
other men for half of the trip, he says, "I want to get out of my coffin, this fucking piece of tin
junk" (195) which is modern technology, a coffin for men like Lewis. Ed says of Lewis at the
end of the book, "He can die now; he knows that dying is better than immortality. He is a human
being, and a good one" (235). No longer the mythic warrior hero in his own or the other's eyes,
Lewis joins the "soft-jowled suburbanites" (Dickey, Night 95) to live out his life.
Bobby Trippe can be seen as an extremely ironic reversal of Campbell's hero as lover. The bride
to which the hero is entitled after the slaying of the monster or tyrant is for Campbell the
symbolic manifestation of life energy released from the tyrannical hold of the status quo: "She is
the maiden of the innumerable dragon slayings, the bride abducted from the jealous father, the
virgin rescued from the unholy lover" (342). Bobby, rather than being the hero who abducts the
bride, is himself rescued from the unholy lover, but only after he is violated. This violation
makes Bobby a pariah and an embarrassment for the remainder of the trip, especially to Ed who
admits that "he felt tainted to me" (111).
In the clearest instance of gender typing in the book, Ed refuses to see any value whatever in
Bobby's clear role as nurturer in the novel. Instead, Ed continually describes Bobby as "deadweight" (234). When Ed goes up to kill the second mountain man he perceives Bobby as a
coward because he "can't even shoot a bow" (132). He is even ready to kill Bobby for leaving
later than he is supposed to. Bobby emerges from the novel as the male having the most
traditionally "feminine" attributes: He is raped rather than being the rapist, he cares for Lewis
while Ed goes off to do the "man's work" of killing, and he is physically weaker than the others.
Thus, much to their disdain, while the men think that they have left the women behind to go on
this quest, it is clear that they are wrong. As Campbell says of the woman the lover hero finds on
his quest, "She is the other portion of the hero himself--for each is both" (342).
The image of what was traditionally the raper, man, being raped is also a powerful metaphor
appropriate to our modern times. All the men in this novel are "raped" by the river in terms of
physical violation and subjugation. They are also emasculated by the technological society from
which they came. But, as Davis points out (226), the belief that the strongest will survive in
nature is inverted in Deliverance. Bobby, the weakest, is the least hurt of the men at the end of
the trip. Chet Taylor may be right in observing that "Perhaps he who submits to violation is the
model of the modern survivor. We seem a long way from Darwin's survival of the fittest, or are
we? Conditions for survival have changed with civilization. Perhaps Bobby is now the most fit"
(62).
Ed Gentry emerges as an ironic modern version of Campbell's hero as emperor/tyrant. As
Campbell points out, the heroic quest is an ongoing cycle, for as the hero vanquishes the status
quo to liberate the society's life energy, he becomes the new status quo which must in turn be
vanquished. The ways in which the hero chooses to represent his status as cultural symbol
determine whether he is regarded as a benevolent emperor or a tyrant to be usurped. Yet, either
way, the hero who returns to lead his people has made some atonement with the Father, who is
"the invisible unknown"; thus, "The hero blessed by the father, returns to represent the father
among men" (Hero 345, 347).
In Deliverance, the Father is clearly the wilderness itself, the river. It is also clear that Ed,
especially in the pivotal cliff-climbing scene, attains the closest thing in the novel to a
communion with the natural world. The overtly sexual language involved in Ed's climb up the
cliff (151) perpetuates yet reverses the sense of physical violation which the river has accorded
the men. Ed achieves a heightened consciousness (120, 157) as well as a temporary, primal,
animal state (167-170) through his "fusion" with nature and the mountain man whom he kills. Ed
seizes the scepter of control from Lewis and takes over as the leader of the men on the remainder
of the trip as well as afterward, during the police investigation. But accompanying Ed's heroism
are both a negative movement toward tyranny in his attitude toward Bobby and a barbarism to
which he nearly succumbs after killing the mountain man. Still, when Ed says, at the close of the
novel, that the river now "ran nowhere but in my head, but there it ran as though immortally"
(234), he can be seen as the hero who returns to represent the Father among men and "Since he is
now centered in the source, he makes visible the repose and harmony of the central place"
(Campbell, Hero 347). His artistic creativity is revitalized upon his return for, as he says, "The
river underlies, in one way or another, everything I do" (234).
But, of course, the irony of Ed's heroic status is that it must remain a secret to himself. There is
no repose for him. The symbol of the emperor hero, Campbell says, is the "scepter of dominion,
or the book of the law" (345), but the men must forever shrink from the law. Ed the hero, who
should have returned to redefine the law as the men did after killing the first mountain man (108110) says at the end: "There is still a special small fear in any strange automobile headlights near
the house, or any phone call with an unfamiliar voice in it ... (233). The only control which Ed
maintains is in the lie which he, Bobby, and Lewis must perpetuate about the events which have
occurred: "My lies seemed better, more and more like truth; the bodies in the woods and in the
river did not move" (215).
Finally, Drew Ballinger can be seen as both the hero as world redeemer and the hero as saint in
an ironic sense. Campbell notes that while some heroes might return to represent the Father as
"emissary," the ultimate hero is the one who realizes that "I and the Father are one" (349). Thus,
this hero reconciles the contradictions and dualities of the world knowing that "The hero of
yesterday becomes the tyrant of tomorrow, unless he crucifies himself today" (Hero 353). Drew,
described by Ed as "the best of us" and "the only decent one; the only sane one" (186), cannot
accept the men's relativistic redefinition of the law. In answer to Lewis' statement--"There's not
any right thing"--Drew says, "You bet there is. ... There's only ONE thing" (107). In death,
Drew's eyes are described as "seeming to see out of the open water, back into the mountains,
around all the curves of the river, infinitely" (183). The other men, while they feel they need to
know whether Drew's gunshot wound was fatal, can never be sure it was. There remains an
indeterminacy in Drew's death, as much a suicide as a murder.
If the "repose and harmony of the central place" is made visible in any man, it is in Drew, whose
guitar playing with the albino boy "emphasized nothing, but through everything he played there
was a lovely unimpeded flowing that seemed endless" (55). Unable to reconcile the duplicity and
non-harmony of this world and of the other men, and having given the world a glimpse of the
harmony at the central place, Drew becomes the hero as Saint, described by Campbell:
The pattern is that of going to the Father, but to the unmanifest rather than the manifest aspect:
taking the step that the Bodhisattva renounced: that from which there is no return. Not the
paradox of the dual perspective, but the ultimate claim of the unseen is here intended. The ego is
burnt out. Like a dead leaf in a breeze, the body continues to move about the earth, but the soul
has dissolved already into the ocean of bliss(Hero 354).
The irony of Drew's death is the reaction of his wife to his death. She says to Ed that "It's all so
useless" (230), and indeed it is. No world redemption is achieved through the death of this good
man, for all remains a secret. There are only Ed's "nightmares and night sweats to come" (187) in
thinking of Drew's calloused fingers sinking into the river.
What these characterizations, and their sometimes bitterly ironic resemblance to heroic
mythology like that described by Campbell, suggest is that modern, technological man cannot
travel the same path as our ancestors in attempting to discover what it means to be a man (or
woman). We must write new myths. Far from being a macho adventure novel, Deliverance calls
into question the entire notion of heroism as it has been established through the centuries in the
many manifestations of the initiating epic journey to the wilderness. As Campbell says at the end
of Myths To Live By,
Our mythology now, therefore, is to be of infinite space and its light, which is without as well as
within. Like moths, we are caught in the spell of its allure, flying to it outward, to the moon and
beyond, and flying to it, also, inward(274-275).
Perhaps, as with Ed, we must be content with the notion that now the rivers run nowhere but in
our heads, but there they run as though immortally.
Works Cited
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With A Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1949.
------. Myths to Live By. New York: Bantam, 1972.
Davis, Charles. "The Wilderness Revisited--Irony in James Dickey's Deliverance." Studies in
American Fiction 4 (Autumn 1976): 223-230.
Dickey, James. Deliverance. New York: Dell, 1970.
------. Night Hurdling. Columbia and Bloomfield Hills: Bruccoli Clark, 1983.
------. Self-Interviews. Ed. Barbara & James Reiss. Garden City: Doubleday, 1970.
Eisiminger, Sterling. "James Dickey's Deliverance: A Source Note." American Notes & Queries
19 (Nov/Dec 1980): 53-54.
Foust, R. E. "Tactus Eruditus: Phenomenology as Method and Meaning of James Dickey's
Deliverance." Studies in American Fiction 9.2 (1981): 199-216.
Love, Glen. "Ecology in Arcadia." Colorado Quarterly 21 (1972): 182.
Taylor, Chet. "A Look into the Heart of Darkness: A View of Deliverance." James Dickey:
Splintered Sunlight. Ed. Patricia De La Fuente. Edinburgh, TX: Pan American University, 1979.
59-64.
Wagner, Linda. "Deliverance: Initiation and Possibility". Modern Critical Views: James Dickey.
Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea, 1987. 107-118.
Source Citation
Schmitt, Ronald. "Transformations of the Hero in James Dickey's Deliverance." James Dickey
Newsletter 8.1 (Fall 1991): 9-16. Rpt. in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Linda
Pavlovski. Vol. 151. Detroit: Gale, 2004. Literature Resource Center. Web. 2 May. 2011.
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