Title: The Savage Mind: James Dickey's Deliverance
Abstract: On the dust jacket of the first edition of James Dickey's Deliverance an eye peers out through a surrounding cluster of hemlock fronds. It is not the poison hemlock shrub of Socrates, but the benign water-loving hemlock tree (Tsuga canadensis) of our Appalachian forests. It would grow in abundance, probably in virgin stands, along the Cahulawassee, the fictional river on which most of the story of Deliverance takes place. The fronds provide the screen of Nature from which the eye looks out. The eye's blue iris is the color of the sky--or of clear deep pools of water. The white ball is the color of clouds--or of turbid falling waters. The skin around the eye has the green cast of deep forests. Is it the eye of the murderous mountaineer? The eye of the narrator Ed Gentry? Of some Nature spirit or pantheistic god? Is it the eye of the author? Probably it is all of these, for it is the eye of the book itself. In lectures and readings Dickey often quotes the final statement of Rilke's poem Archaic Torso of Apollo: You must change your life. (Du muss dein leben andern.) This, says Dickey, is what all important art demands, and certainly this is the effect that Dickey wants his work--poems and novels--to have on his readers. I am reminded of the warning Boehme gives at the outset of one of his books: he asks his readers to go no further unless they are willing to make changes in their lives that the book will call for; if they are not, then reading the book might be bad for them, even dangerous. Readers of Deliverance might heed a similar warning, for the novel records a harrowing descent into the abyss, the dark chasm of our own psyches; and the change Dickey calls for is in our understanding of ourselves as human animals whose genetic origins lie in a dark but certain past. Unless the reader understands the violence of the story as it relates to his own psyche, then the effect of the novel might indeed be dangerous. Denn da ist keine Stelle, die dich nicht sieht. This assertion which precedes the final statement of Rilke's poem seems even more to the point: There is no part that does not see you. We stand naked before the naked work of art. It sees us--and if we have the stomach for it, we see ourselves, through reflection and contrast--for what we are: flawed, incomplete creatures; and we must change, or, at least, accept the imperative to change. Flawed certainly, but to say we are incomplete may be misleading: our incompleteness often results from our refusal to accept a part of ourselves, an innate part of our psyches, which we are afraid to claim. Under the intimidating light of modern civilization, we hide our shadow, our instinctual selves, not only because we distrust it, but also because John Locke and the Enlightenment have convinced us that it does not exist. The Puritan/ Manichean ethos has taught us to project it conveniently elsewhere--as the devil, or on some darker complexioned race. Yet from time to time we feel the Aurignacian Man lurking just beneath our skins, and that scares the devil out of us; so we turn him out, or push him back deep into the recesses of our psyches, where we will not have to face his reality at close hand. To that subterfuge of modern man Dickey says his No--not in Thunder, but to the roar of mountain water. In the poem Falling the protagonist strips away her clothes, the integuments of civilization, to the roar of wind, as she falls from womb to grave, discovering--or inventing--in the process who she is. In Deliverance Dickey strips himself bare by breaking the psyche down into its component parts and testing them in a baptism, a trial by water, original water, near the source, not yet damped by the controls of civilization: the uterine font, launching the quartet of characters forth into a new life where only the fittest will prevail. And so the eye of Dickey's book sees us: subdued creatures of an urban-industrial civilization, separated from Nature--save our own; and that nature-in-ourselves we cannot understand because of our isolation from the natural world which could furnish the analogies necessary for understanding. …
Publication Year: 1996
Publication Date: 1996-03-22
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 1
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