[In the following essay, Bidney traces the influence of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's writing in Dickey's Deliverance.]

"I like to work my mind, such as it is," said James Dickey to Francis Roberts in 1968, "to see what I can get out of it and put into it. As John Livingston Lowes revealed in that wonderful book on Coleridge, The Road to Xanadu, if these things are in your mind, Lord knows what amalgams you can get out of it." Two years later, in his 1970 novel Deliverance, Dickey demonstrated his capacity to produce not only a visionary "amalgam" of the sort he found laid out in Lowes but, more surprisingly, a richly suggestive pattern of allusions to the work of Coleridge himself. In what follows I would like to offer a brief "Road to Deliverance," exploring that neo-Coleridgean pattern and its (re)visionary implications.

Dickey has elsewhere made clear his fondness for Coleridge. It has been noted that the last line of the war poem "Bread" ("I ate the food I ne'er had eat") varies "It ate the bread it ne'er had eat" from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." And in 1965 Dickey expressed to an interviewer from Eclipse the ambition to produce in his own verse "a sense such as if you stumbled on the village idiot, and he began to mutter amazing things to you, and, like in 'The Ancient Mariner,' you could not help but hear…." Deliverance, as the title of my essay implies, is firmly anchored in the thematic pattern of "Mariner." But "The Eolian Harp" and "Dejection" and "Kubla Khan" will be seen to play a role as well; Dickey has done many and varied things with the legacy of his wise but troubled mentor.

Daniel B. Marin, the one critic who refers explicitly to "Ancient Mariner" in the context of Deliverance, writes that the tone at the book's conclusion is "quiet and maybe even melancholy. I am reminded of Coleridge's Wedding Guest: 'A sadder and a wiser man / He rose the morrow morn,' though not exactly. Is it that the note of 'pure abandon' Dickey reaches so wonderfully in the poetry can never be sung here in the darklight, in the 'darkness visible' of Deliverance?" My own feeling about the contrast between the endings of "Mariner" and Deliverance is rather the opposite of Marin's: I find Dickey more disposed to conclude on a note of comradely reassurance. Coleridge's aged sailor must endlessly retell the tale of his crime in an immortal repetition compulsion that is rightly styled "Life-in-Death." By contrast, Dickey's narrator Ed Gentry is not possessed by the vision of his narrative; the story is his possession—not something he owns up to guiltily, but something he owns proudly: "The river and everything I remembered about it became a possession to me, a personal, private possession, as nothing else in my life ever had. Now it ran nowhere but in my head, but there it ran as though immortally."

This is no Life-in-Death but a far pleasanter kind of immortality. Ed Gentry tells us that his hero-friend, Medlock Lewis—likewise no guilt-ridden intrusive presence but comfortingly called "a human being, and a good one"—refers to Ed confidentially as "U.C., which means—to him and me—'Unorganized Crime,' and this has become a kind of minor conversation piece at parties, and at lunch in the city with strangers." Unorganized Crime of this smoothed-over sort, when juxtaposed to the Mariner's paranoid guilt obsession, seems a fraternal joke, or a whimsical authorial wink at the visionary tradition: "U. C." = "You (and I) see."

Yet the sad wisdom invoked by Marin is deep-rooted in Dickey's book as well; indeed, the entire conflictual structure of the work is Coleridgean. Every reader of "Mariner" feels the unresolved tension between the explicit transcendent message of cosmic love and the punishing prophetic burden of the driven wanderer who is forced to preach it, the difficulty of separating divine revelation from cruel fate, heavenly truth from purgatorial reality. Dickey's two epigraphs epitomize a similar unresolved tension between metaphysical meaning and the sense of ungovernable chaos, as the biblical Obadiah reveals a meaningful moral order ("The pride of thine heart hath deceived thee") while the philosopher Georges Bataille blames the inescapable conditions of human life itself for our frustrations ("Il existe à la base de la vie humaine, un principe d'insuffisance").

This is the same tension or conflict that generally divides analyses of Dickey's book into two groups. Some critical accounts of Deliverance have emphasized the heartening messages apparently conveyed: "penetrating insights into the political values forged by the American experience" [Charles M. Redenius, "Recreating the Social Contract: James Dickey's Deliverance," The Canadian Review of American Studies 17 (1986): 285-99], "the alleviation of fears associated with the omnipotence of thought by making restitution for hostile, destructive wishes" [James W. Hamiltion, "James Dickey's Deliverance: Midlife and the Creative Process," in American Imago 384 (1981): 389-405], or the "discovery, in extremis, that the sole means of controlling anxiety is through the imposition of aesthetic order" and "the maintenance of civilized values" [Michail K. Glenday, "Deliverance and the Aesthetics of Survival," in American Literature 56 (1984): 149-61]. Other analyses have just as emphatically portrayed the overwhelming power of evil or "darkness visible" in Deliverance—the idea that the narrator's "being-beyond-himself is the result of an act of transgression" [Heinz Tschachler, "Un principe d'insuffisance: Dickey's Dialogue with Bataille," in Mosaic 20 (1987): 81-93], or the analogous potentials for evil revealed in both heroes and villains ("The 'countrified jerk' in the city who wants a girl's buttocks in his ad is a part of Ed himself, and his domain is deep in Ed's unconscious"; "The cat that claws the girl's panties in Ed's dream and the owl that rips the canvas of Ed's tent anticipate the bestial man who commands Bobby to 'drop them panties'" in the scene of sexual violence [Peggy Goodman Endel, "Dickey, Dante, and the Demonic: Reassessing Deliverance," in American Literature 60 (1988): 611-24]).

What the pattern of Coleridgean allusion accomplishes is to dramatize all these conflicting tendencies and thereby to heighten the visionary drama of Deliverance. We shall see that here, as in "Mariner," images of spirit-like bird and flashing water-snake each embody an ambivalence; juxtaposed, they create still further conflict. The motifs of multiple corpses and cosmic love, taken from Coleridge's enigmatic epos of terror and transcendence, are enlisted in the service of Dickey's equally vivid moral-metaphysical chiaroscuro. Additional themes—dulcimer and sacred circle from "Kubla Khan," wind-played musical instrument and dancing diamonds on the main from "The Eolian Harp," as well as the motifs of rottenness, water tracks, angels, fire-water unity and the moving moon from "Mariner"—give Deliverance a pervasively Coleridgean ambiance and make it a major neo-Romantic re-envisioning and revision.

"Revision" is the key word here, for it is not only the reassuring tonality of the ending that (as I have suggested) distinguishes Deliverance from "Mariner." Rather, this changed conclusion indicates a noticeable shift in concern—from the psychodynamics of persecution to the ambivalences central to (human) nature. Only through the extremely risky unleashing of a desire for violent victory does Ed attain the transcendent insights of pantheistic oneness. As Heinz Tschachler has shown, this is a troublesome dialectic traceable in part to Georges Bataille: in Deliverance as in the thinking of Bataille, only when the "principle of individuation" is put at risk (as a result of the individual's risking his life) are hidden continuities exposed to view and feelings of sacred merger briefly attainable. By strategic alterations and re-orchestration of Coleridgean motifs Dickey makes this thesis vivid and its exemplum ineffaceably present to the imagination.

As Lewis, with evangelizing fervor, outlines to Ed his project for a canoeing venture, the latter worries at one point that "he's going to turn this into … A lesson. A Moral"; here Ed shows the same discomfort with "morals" that Coleridge showed when responding to Anna Barbauld's complaint that "Ancient Mariner" lacked a moral, the poet famously countered that it had "too much" of one. Ed buys into the trip, mainly out of boredom induced by routine; when his wife asks, "Is it my fault?" he says no but thinks to himself that "it partly was, just as it's any woman's fault who represents normalcy." Ed likes his wife well enough; it's just that married life has the fault of being normal: in "Mariner" the Wedding Guest was obliged to direct his imaginative attention to something a good deal less normal than weddings, and in Deliverance the same priority is given to an extraordinary experience promised by a man. Lewis's surname, "Medlock," has in fact a striking resemblance to "wedlock," but what Lewis offers in proposing his expedition for a group of four men is a venture in platonic male bonding, a male adventure trip that will temporarily replace the routine life Ed leads in wedlock (an idea hideously parodied, of course, in the eventual rape committed by the rural stranger). One may find a bit of misogyny in this humdrum picture of marriage, but if so, it is a problem Dickey shares with Coleridge.

The chief attraction of the trip for Ed, as sportsman, is not canoeing but hunting with a bow; only in the film version is a crossbow used, certainly an additional contribution to "Mariner" thematics. Allusions to the motif of the albatross are also oblique, but they are multiple, varied, and ingenious. The alb-syllable, an etymon for the whiteness of the white bird, appears, along with the birdlike motif of music, when the "albino boy" Lonnie plays banjo in a duet of magical beauty with Ed's and Lewis's co-traveler Drew. Playing with Lonnie makes even the back of Drew's neck express "sheer joy": the albino conveys a sudden and profound inspiration, like that suggested by Coleridge's quasi-supernatural white bird. Each of the albino's eyes is singular in its strange independence, as they focus in different directions; soon afterwards, another singular eye, the "glazed" and "half-open" eye of a chicken's head, appears to the travelers in a stagnant patch of river downstream from the poultry plant. So even if no albatross is killed in Deliverance, the singular eye of the bird-related albino appears to us soon in a metamorphosed form of death.

Bird allusions abound in the first part of Deliverance; for example, a certain Mr. Holley, Ed's subordinate in his design consulting firm, turns "one of [Georges] Braque's birds into a Pegasus," and Lewis Medlock himself rather strikingly resembles a bird, with his "face like a hawk," beakish "longnosed" profile, and "whitish patch up toward the crown of his head." C. Hines Edwards, Jr. has specifically studied the prominent and recurrent owl-theme, noting the contrasts it embodies: the owl is at once bird "of prey" and "bird of wisdom," conventionally an "ill omen" and yet used in the book to suggest both nature and—in the form of the owl-shaped wind chime—civilization.

But two Coleridgean insights need to be added to this. First, the repeated mention of the "ringing of the owl on the other birds, in Martha's wind-toy at home" brings the bird motif together with the Aeolian harp motif, betokening Coleridgean inspiration: wind chimes are modern suburbia's answer to the Aeolian harp. Second, the owl that repeatedly visits Ed during the night—and whose frightening "stony toe" Ed even learns to touch without fear—resembles a familiar spirit, a haunting presence familiar yet uncanny in its incessant departures and returns: "All night the owl kept coming back to hunt from the top of the tent," just as the Coleridgean albatross, "every day, for food or play, / Came to the mariner's hollo!" In its quasi-supernatural uncanniness, in its friendly association with the wind-generated music favored by Coleridge, and in its ambivalent implications, Dickey's owl-symbol, like the musical albino, shares the enigmatic nature of the Coleridgean Mariner's albatross. Even in its size the owl is exceptional, closer to the ungainly dimensions of the Coleridgean bird—a "big night bird—surely it was very big, from the size of the nails and feet."

The ambivalent implications of both albatross and owl are in part covert: the Mariner has no way of suspecting that if he kills the albatross 200 sailors' deaths will result; and Ed, who spends the night pleasantly imagining the owl's hunting feats on its various flights, does not imagine that the huge "talons" which had so terrifyingly punctured the roof of his tent are foreshadowings of the lex talionis, the pitiless rule of retribution or Law of the Claw that will govern the latter part of the men's violent adventure. But in both the Coleridge and Dickey narratives, an atmosphere of nausea is quickly induced by the recurrent use of the theme of "rot" as the tales proceed. After the Mariner kills the bird, "The very deep did rot: O Christ! / That ever this should be!" After the rural villain commits his rape of Bobby, the adventurers find themselves "by a sump of some kind, a blue-black seepage of rotten water," and when Lewis kills the rapist and tries to bury the body, the earth has turned into sheer rot: "There was no earth; it was all leaves and rotten stuff. It had the smell of generations of mould." In both stories, intimations of unfathomably deep corruption overwhelm the soul and body.

Yet it is not long before the moon provides, for both Coleridge's and Dickey's protagonists, a moving emblem of visionary hope. Life-in-Death has won the Mariner's soul; Drew has been murdered by the rapist's cohort. Yet the Mariner, at least, has triumphed over Death itself; and Lewis and Ed have worked out their plans for both defense and retribution—they, too, can somehow glory in "pure survival." The moon, betokening hope, is evoked with strikingly similar language in the two works. Coleridge's marginal annotations describe a "silent joy" in the scene where "The moving Moon went up the sky, / And no where did abide: / Softly she was going up …" (emphases added). And Ed tells us his "heart expanded with joy" as he watched while "the moon was going up and up …" (emphases added). It will only take another moment, in both narratives, for the climactic water-snake epiphany to arise in moonlit glory.

Let us look first at the Coleridgean precedent, which Dickey will vary in a composite epiphany consisting of four brief episodes. In the light of the just-ascended moon, says the Mariner,

      I watched the water-snakes:
      They moved in tracks of shining white,
      And when they reared, the elfish light
      Fell off in hoary flakes.
      ..............................
      They coiled and swam; and every track
      Was a flash of golden fire.
 
      O happy living things! no tongue
      Their beauty might declare:
      A spring of love gushed from my heart,
      And I blessed them unaware….

Traditionally cursed, the seeming symbol of evil is revealed as in its unfamiliar way wholly divine. Serpentine horrors can now be seen as inseparable from the life-power, the fertility and wisdom and immortality, that mythic traditions world-wide have rightly credited to the coiled ouroboros.

In Dickey's four-phase moonlit epiphany all the appearances of the water-snake are metaphoric. But they are overpoweringly real. And note the evocative borrowings already in phase one:

Despite everything, I looked down. The river had spread flat and filled with moonlight. It took up the whole of space under me, bearing in the center of itself a long coiling image of light, a chill, bending flame. I must have been seventy-five or a hundred feet above it, hanging poised over some kind of inescapable glory, a bright pit. (emphasis added)

Coleridge's "fire" is Dickey's "flame"; the Mariner's snakes that flashingly "coiled" have become Ed's "coiling image of light"; moonlight fills the water in both scenes. Dickey wants no loss of symbolic ambivalence in the transfer: he insists on the image of the snaky abyss in his "bright pit." Inescapable glory is wedded to acceptance of the lowest.

In fact, a few pages later the light spreads out on the water "eternally, the moon so huge on it that it hurt the eyes," just as the Mariner speaks soon afterward of the blinding lightning descending from moon-level as "a river steep and wide." And when "angelic spirits" come down instantly to enter the bodies of the dead and one of these spirits even helps the Mariner as they pull together "at one rope," a precedent is set for a vivid metaphoric wording in Dickey's analogous multiphase epiphany: "The thought struck me with my full adrenaline supply, all hitting the veins at once. Angelic. Angelic. Is that what it means? It very likely does. And I have a lot of nylon rope…." Coleridge writes of watersnakes and heavenly angels in the literal language of suspended disbelief, of high gothic dreamwork; Dickey's snakes and angels are metaphoric, observing the conventions of lyrical-psychological prose. But it is still visionary prose—vatic, and Coleridgean.

The third phase of the metaphoric water-snake epiphany returns to Coleridge's original depiction of the snakes:

What a view, I said again. The river was blank and mindless with beauty. It was the most glorious thing I have ever seen. But it was not seeing, really. For once it was not just seeing. It was beholding. I beheld the river in its icy pit of brightness, in its farbelow sound and indifference, in its large coil and tiny points and flashes of the moon, in its long sinuous form, in its uncomprehending consequence. (emphases added, except for "beheld," italicized by Dickey)

Words like "mindless" and "indifference" and "uncomprehending" recall the Mariner's blessing the snakes "unaware"; the "large coil" and "long sinuous form" make the serpent-image gloriously present in an emphatically Coleridgean way; the "tiny points and flashes of the moon" on the water clearly recall the "hoary flakes" of moonlight and the multiform "flash" of reflected moon-fire from Coleridge's sacred scene. Ed's experience is a visionary triumph—an act of not mere seeing but beholding—in itself. But reading it with Coleridge in mind heightens its vibrancy and reveals it as a worthy homage to a suitably complex and many-sided master.

The fourth and final phase of the neo-Coleridgean epiphany repeats and underlines the main motifs—awe, the life-force, the moon, the metaphoric snake, the visionary light:

Fear and a kind of enormous moon-blazing sexuality lifted me, millimeter by millimeter…. I looked for a slice of gold … in the river … something lovable, in the huge serpent-shape of light.

Above me the darks changed, and in one of them was a star. On both sides of that small light the rocks went on up, black and solid as ever, but their power was broken….

I was crying. What reason? There was not any, for I was really not ashamed or terrified; I was just there…. Lord, Lord. The river hazed and danced into the sparkle of my eyelashes, the more wonderful for being unbearable. (emphases added)

Ed's mysterious sense that the "power" of the rocks was "broken" by the visionary light makes us remember how "The spell begins to break" in Coleridge's marginal annotation to the line, after the water-snake epiphany, in which the Mariner finds himself finally able again to worship. "That selfsame moment I could pray," says the Mariner—the precedent for Ed's joyous, awed outcry, "Lord, Lord." The fact that the river "hazed and danced into the sparkle of [Ed's] eyelashes" (emphases added) alludes to yet another epiphanic scene: recall the speaker in "The Eolian Harp," who stretches his limbs at noon "Whilst through my half-clos'd eyelids I behold / The sunbeams dance, like diamonds, on the main" (emphases added). Dickey has conflated two scenarios of Coleridgean glory.

Coleridgean revelation also sheds a closely reláted light on Ed's foolhardy but heroic adventurer-mentor, Lewis Medlock. For all his miscalculations and improvidence, Medlock is deemed worthy of transfiguration for a moment in a clever variant of the Mariner's water-snake reverie. We remember that when the water-snakes glided through the moonlit waves, "every track / Was a flash of golden fire": the tracks of the glorious creatures seem wondrously to unite the incompatible elements of fire and water. The same word, "track," the same motif of tracks in the water, and the same quasi-miraculous union of the fiery and the liquid ("red" for fire and "blue" for water) are motifs reworked in Ed's wonderstruck portrait of his mentor:

Everything he had done for himself for years paid off as he stood there in his tracks in the water. I could tell by the way he glanced at me; the payoff was in my eyes…. The muscles were bound up in him smoothly, and when he moved, the veins in the moving part would surface. If you looked at him that way, he seemed made out of well-matched red-brown chunks wrapped in blue wire. (emphases added)

The "Mariner" variation is ingenious, unobtrusive, and effective. In the vivid and often coarse tale that constitutes Deliverance, Dickey has lost none of the delicate allusive subtlety that distinguishes him as lyric poet.

When Coleridge somewhat perversely insisted to Mrs. Barbauld that "Ancient Mariner" had too much of a moral—that it "ought to have had no more moral than the Arabian Nights' tale" of the merchant who, during a snack, tosses a nutshell aside and is accused of murder because a genie claims the shell has put out the eye of the genie's son—Coleridge was mistaken. The cosmic love moral, as we may call it—

      He prayeth well, who loveth well
      Both man and bird and beast.
 
      He prayeth best, who loveth best
      All things both great and small;
      For the dear God who loveth us,
      He made and loveth all

—is crucial to the poem's enduring fascination, which lies precisely in the tension between the Mariner's moment of transcendence and the immense, absurdly disproportionate price he has to pay for it. Such paradoxes afflict and bless and puzzle all of us. James Dickey's Deliverance likewise takes account of them, building on Coleridge's insights, not on his arbitrary or irked disclaimers.

There are many cosmic love or universal empathy passages in Dickey's narrative, suitably presented in the context of the four-phase water-snake epiphany: for example, as he moves up the steep escarpment, Ed begins, as it were, to "make love to the cliff"; as he inches upward he moves "with the most intimate motions of my body, motions I had never dared use with Martha, or with any other human woman." But the central, most striking passage of paradoxical empathy is the one in which Ed opens up to a strange transpersonal oneness with his enemy, precisely the man on whom he will wreak revenge with a bowshot for the murder of Drew:

I had thought so long and hard about him that to this day I still believe I felt, in the moonlight, our minds fuse. It was not that I felt myself turning evil, but that an enormous physical indifference, as vast as the whole abyss of light at my feet, came to me: an indifference not only to the other man's body scrambling and kicking on the ground with an arrow through it, but also to mine. 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.

This cosmic empathy feeling recurs repeatedly in ever-changing forms: a few pages later we read, for example,

The needles were filling slowly with the beginnings of daylight, and the tree began to flow softly, shining the frail light held by the needles inward on me, and I felt as though I were giving it back outward.

Even after he has killed the offender, Ed feels that "His brain and mine unlocked and fell apart, and in a way I was sorry to see it go. I never had thought with another man's mind on matters of life and death, and would never think that way again." The precedent for these seemingly inconceivable unities disclosed in existential crisis may be found in "Mariner," but the Coleridgean revelation is elaborated and multiply varied in Deliverance.

It would not be easy—to say the least of it—for Ed "to get used to the idea that I had buried three men [the rapist killed by Lewis, then Drew, and finally Drew's murderer] in two days, and that I had killed one of them." But the neo-Coleridgean fascination of Ed's narrative would not exert its hypnotic force without both of the factors that constitute the book's reason-challengingantinomy, its tragic enlightenment: multiple corpses and cosmic empathy; deadly peril and lifegiving love—a quasi-mystical or pantheist transcendence that arises from an existential test, pushing aside the principle of individuation to reveal unimaginable continuities, unsuspected and not always gratifying oneness.

It is in the light of this antinomy, finally, that we should read the "Kubla Khan" and "Dejection" allusions in the earlier part of Deliverance—which I have postponed for separate treatment for that reason. These unmistakable allusions begin when Lewis tries to interest Ed in the folkloric riches of mountain music: "there are songs in those hills that collectors have never put on tape. And I've seen one family with a dulcimer." "If those people in the hills," retorts Ed skeptically, "the ones with the folk songs and dulcimers, came out of the hills and led us all toward a new heaven and a new earth, it would not make a particle of difference to me" (emphases added). In this wittily allusive interchange we not only hear an echo of Coleridge's "damsel with a dulcimer" but also an ironic reference to the "new Earth and new Heaven" which Imagination gives us by "wedding Nature to us"—as it does when Aeolian harps (which are wind-dulcimers, emblems of the harmonious unity of spirit/breath and world) function properly.

The Coleridgean irony grows into a dreadful grotesquerie after the villainous rapist, mortally wounded by Lewis's avenging arrow, goes into "convulsions" that resemble the visionary seizure of the shaman-figure depicted in "Kubla Khan":

He took a couple of strides toward the woods and then seemed to change his mind and danced back to me, lurching and clog-stepping in a secret circle. He held out a hand to me, like a prophet…. (emphases added)

The verb "danced" and the "secret circle" make us think of Coleridge's "Weave a circle round him thrice"—a circle woven precisely through ritual dance; the "lurching" and "convulsions" of the dizzily dancing victim recall the "flashing eyes and floating hair" of the shamanistic seer in "Kubla Khan," his being possessed in a state of seizure, a fit—precisely the mad ecstasy of a "prophet," as Dickey says. All this relates with horrific irony but all-too-evident appropriateness—via the mountain "dulcimer" motif—to the evil archetype of the "demon-lover."

Yet there is a Coleridgean tragic tenderness, as well, in Dickey's final symbolic depiction of the criminal-victim's farewell: "He held out a hand to me, like a prophet…." In a context of Coleridgean allusion, the word "prophecy" refers to no specific predictions or forecasts; rather, it points to some transcendent insight or awareness of ultimate value: here, the prophetic insight acquired—even by a bestial villain—at the threshold of death is unspoken, perhaps unspeakable. The Ancient Mariner, too, was a prophet, though a reluctant one, like Jonah, or like Paul. It may, indeed, be best to end our comparative journey with this final instance of an epitomizing symbol of deep kinships that can never be fully articulated, a symbolic gesture that serves as testimony to a neo-Coleridgean seed of enlightenment arising from crisis and trial, a "bright pit."