[In the following essay, Thompson considers the “heraldic symbolism” found in Dickey's Deliverance.]

Originally published in 1970, Deliverance, James Dickey's first and most popular novel, has been much lauded for its poetic description of nature and for its vivid narration of a harrowing canoe trip down a wild Georgia river by four would-be outdoorsmen from Atlanta whose adventurous weekend getaway quickly turns into a bloody nightmare once they discover “the primordial dangers of the river.”¹ Their overly romanticized view of nature—and what might lurk in it—is shattered by their encounter with human savagery and depravity, including torture, rape, and murder. The naive quartet of urban Nimrods learn through blood trial that, as D. H. Lawrence once argued, “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.”²

Although lambasted in the early seventies by numerous social and political critics for its machismo and violence, Deliverance became a huge best-seller since “The plot had the ingredients for a surefire success, the old adventure story of hunter and hunted in a modern setting, with urban men forced to regain primitive instincts in order to kill and survive.”³ Furthermore, the many “Mythological and archetypal readings, even Jungian interpretations, suggest that Dickey … caught in this novel something far more than the average adventure story” (Calhoun and Hill 118). This wild river journey is “as old at least as The Gilgamesh,” and its literary lineage extends “through The Odyssey, The Divine Comedy, King Lear, Faust, Moby-Dick,” and well beyond (Butterworth 71). It is a riveting tale of personal growth gained by meeting challenge, of great wisdom earned by spilling blood. In short, “Deliverance provides an initiation which … is brutal and adolescent. …”⁴ The three suburbanites who survive the ordeal, much like Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Aeneas, Ishmael, et al., will be forever changed by their frightening journey; they will never again view the world or their fellow man with the same dull eyes.

Just as in so many memorable novels, such as A Tale of Two Cities, Pride and Prejudice, The Portrait of a Lady, and Moby-Dick, the opening lines of Deliverance provide important background information as well as foreshadow what the plot holds for the reader; the first person narrator, Ed Gentry, describes an uncooperative topographical map of north Georgia spread out on a bar room table:

It unrolled slowly, forced to show its colors, curling and snapping back whenever one of us turned loose. The whole land was very tense until we put four steins on its corners and laid the river out to run for us through the mountains 150 miles north. Lewis' hand took a pencil and marked out a small strong X in a place where some of the green bled away and the paper changed with high ground, and began to work downstream, northeast to southwest through the printed woods.⁵

Although the topography of this “map anticipates the land's and the river's energy,” the wild waterway is quite unremarkable; the Cahulawassee will, like all streams, eventually find its way to the sea or some other large body of open water.⁶ However, there is a very subtle bit of heraldic symbolism in the compass directions provided in the narrator's description: the fifty-mile stretch of river chosen for the ill-starred canoe trip runs precisely bend sinister—from upper left to lower right—on the colorful map the four men study so carefully in the opening scene. This subtle allusion, so very early in the novel, to medieval heraldic devices dovetails elegantly with the idea, suggested by numerous critics, that Deliverance offers a modernized, urbanized treatment of the archetypal male quest story, a journey tale as old as Moses, as violent as Beowulf, as noble as Arthur.

The beginnings of heraldry as we know it are relatively well documented: it “originated independently in western Europe and in Japan, in each case in the twelfth century.”⁷ Although modern day heraldry is seen by some as merely an affectation of the idle rich or an arcane hobby, it actually developed from military necessity: “When body armour prevented recognition of leaders, the need arose for signs by which to distinguish them” (Pine 31). According to Bruno Bernard Heim, a noted authority on coats of arms and their history, “The supreme law of heraldic design is visibility, arising from the need to see clearly the charges on the shield and helmet in order to recognize their bearer even from a distance and in the heat of battle.”⁸ However, because of the proclivity of some European kings and princes to “scatter their seed,” as it were, “the arms of the illegitimate sons [who often far outnumbered the legitimate heirs] were made to carry some charge or alteration to show that there was some reason which debarred inheritance by their users, whilst there remained those entitled to bear arms without the mark of distinction.”⁹ In other words, bastard sons had to add to their family crests the bend sinister device—two parallel lines drawn from the upper left to the lower right—to symbolize their illegitimacy.

However, the association of the bend sinister with bastardy's taint is not especially germane to Dickey's tale; it is not the main reason for the subtle reference. Rather, there is another meaning inherent in the left-to-right and downward-flowing stretch of the Cahulawassee River, a meaning that is much more symbolically pertinent to the novel; in many ancient cultures—and a few modern ones—the whole left half of the body was considered unclean, was, in fact, the side of the Devil. Hence, it was labeled the “sinister” side in heraldic language, deriving from the Latin for “on the left.” Today, however, the word “sinister” has expanded in meaning to include anything frightening, threatening, evil, wicked, or foreboding. It is to this dark and ominous meaning that the map directions in the opening paragraph so obliquely allude.

Many early cultures believed that Satan lurked—quite literally—just behind a person's left shoulder; from there, he constantly observed human behavior to detect a sin or transgression or moment of weakness. The old superstition that the spilling of salt was horribly unlucky—because of salt's great value to early cultures—led to the practice of tossing a pinch of the spilled condiment over the left shoulder and directly into Satan's eyes. The resulting temporary blindness would enable the person to escape the Evil One and avoid a sure spell of bad luck. Even today, in some societies, children who appear to be born left-handed are forced to become right-handed—occasionally by having their “wrong” hands bound up as tightly as a Chinese maiden's feet. The belief that the left side of the body harbors wickedness is nothing if not persistent.

For over eight centuries—from King Richard the Lion Hearted¹⁰ to Sir Winston Churchill, from dispossessed Scottish lairds to the latest nouveau riche Londoners, from country club crests to blazer buttons—formal heraldry has continued to play an important role in Western life, albeit an increasingly smaller one: “Thanks to its brilliant colors, its power of suggestion, and the rich store of symbols it has accumulated, the noble art of heraldry has been a source of deep and mysterious enchantment for many people down the ages” (Heim 9).

Given James Dickey's detailed description of the segment of the river selected by the four Atlantans for their amateurish and bloody fling with the north Georgia wilderness, the novelist's cryptic allusion to a medieval heraldic device adds an extra touch of meaning to an introductory paragraph that is already richly layered with subtle irony and careful inference. The over-confident quartet of urban knights-errant do not understand the veiled warning in their chosen topography; thus, they suffer the terrible consequences of uneducated and unskilled questing along the Cahulawassee, a left-handed and sinister river.

Notes

1. Keen Butterworth, “The Savage Mind: James Dickey's Deliverance,” The Southern Literary Journal 28.2 (1996): 71. All subsequent references to these sources will be documented parenthetically within the text.

2. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Viking, 1964) 62.

3. Richard J. Calhoun and Robert W. Hill, James Dickey (Boston: Twayne, 1983) 108.

4. Henry J. Lindborg, “James Dickey's Deliverance: The Ritual of Art,” The Southern Literary Journal 6.2 (1974): 90.

5. James Dickey, Deliverance (Boston: Houghton, 1970) 13.

6. Daniel B. Marin, “James Dickey's Deliverance: Darkness Visible,” James Dickey: The Expansive Imagination: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Richard J. Calhoun (Deland, FL: Everett/Edwards, 1973) 108.

7. L. G. Pine, International Heraldry (Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 1970) 20.

8. Bruno Bernard Heim, Heraldry in the Catholic Church: Its Origins, Customs, and Laws (Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, UK: Van Duren, 1978) 12.

9. Arthur Charles Fox-Davies, The Complete Guide to Heraldry (New York: Bonanza, 1978) 509.

10. Reverend Charles Boutell, Boutell's Heraldry, revised by C. W. Scott and J. P. Brooke-Little (London: Frederick Warne, 1963) 121-22. This book was originally published in 1863.