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Banjos and Bows: Harmony and Survival in Deliverance

Ed Gentry, the main character and narrator in James Dickey’s novel Deliverance, states, “I liked hearing the sound of my voice in the mountain speech, especially in the dark; it sounded like somebody who knew where he was and knew what he was doing. I thought of Drew and the albino boy picking and singing in the filling station” (152-153). This statement comes at a critical moment in the novel, in which Ed is attempting to take control of the tragic situation and create a plan of action. Ed finds himself as the last-man-standing after Drew has been killed, Bobby has been sexually assaulted, and Lewis (the usual hyper-masculine leader of the club) has suffered a broken leg. As Anna Creadick says in her article “Banjo Boy: Masculinity, Disability, and Difference in Deliverance,” this is the “moment of Ed’s transformation” (72), the moment he attempts to internalize those characteristics that he admires so much in Lewis, natural masculine instinct and preparedness. As Lewis tells Ed, “survival was not in the rivets and the metal, and not in the double-sealed doors and not in the marbles of Chinese checkers. It was in me. It came down to the man, and what he could do. The body is the one thing you can’t fake; it’s just got to be there” (42). According to Lewis, then, it is the human body, specifically the male human body, that allows for survival and not things, which are simply tools to carry out the will of the human actor. The body can not be faked, according to Lewis, and must be there and ready for anything. Creadick also points to this privileging of the male body in the novel, stating, “Dickey aims to prove that it is not the capacity for love but the capacity for violence that makes men survive, that makes men men” (71). 

Up until the passage that Creadick sees as Ed’s transformation, Ed has not been that instinctive, prepared, idealized man, but has instead been someone that prefers harmony. When discussing his career as a graphic designer, Ed states, “I liked harmoniousness and a situation where the elements didn’t fight with each other or overwhelm each other” (19). In the previously mentioned passage, Ed achieves this harmony with the surrounding wilderness, if only for a brief moment. Ed’s use of “the mountain speech” is what connects Ed to his environment, while at the same time giving him a sense of preparedness, “somebody who knew where he was and knew what he was doing.” It is also important to point out that Ed associates this brief moment of harmony with the brief harmonizing of Drew and Lonnie, the banjo boy. Ed, narrating, the musical collaboration, states,

Drew started in on “Wildwood Flower,” picking it out at medium tempo and not putting in many runs. Lonnie dragged on the rubber bands and slipped the capo up. Drew started to come on with the volume; the Martin boomed out and over the dusty filling station. I had never heard him play so well, and I really began to listen deeply, moved as an unmusical person is moved when he sees that the music is meant. After a little while it sounded as though Drew were adding another kind of sound to every note he played, a higher tinny echo of the melody, and then it broke in on me that this was the banjo, played so softly and rightly that it sounded like Drew’s own fingering [...] He eased out of the melody and played rhythm, and Lonnie took it. He emphasized nothing, but through everything he played there was a lovely unimpeded flowing that seemed endless. His hand, full of long scratches, took time; the fingers moved only slightly, about like those of a good typist; the music was just there. Drew cam)e back in the new key and they finished, riding together. For the last couple of minutes of the song, Drew slid down and went over and stood beside Lonnie. They put the instruments together and leaned close to each other in the pose you see vocal groups and phony folk singers take on TV programs, and something rare and unrepeatable took hold of the way I saw them, the demented country kid and the big-faced decent city man, the minor civic leader and hedge clipper.

There is a desire, a pull, to read this scene romantically, to see music/art as that which brings the native and non-native together in a moment of harmony. This desire is there because, according to Ed’s description and interpretation of Drew and Lonnie’s version the Carter family standard, there is a moment of harmony, a sound moment in which Ed cannot distinguish between Drew’s guitar and Lonnie’s banjo. However, if we read this scene in the context of the novel as a whole, Drew’s death, either by drowning or at the hands of a local, and Creadick’s idea that violence, not love, is necessary for survival, we see Drew’s music/art as a weakness, rather than a strength or method of survival. Also, it is important to take Ed’s desire and need for harmony, particularly during the banjo scene at the filling station, which is at the beginning of their down-river journey. Ed, like Drew, is an artist. The instruments that they use are meant to bring elements together in a harmonious relationship. Ed states, “If there was one thing I felt a reasonable certainty about, it was my ability to get the elements of a layout into some kind of harmonious relationship” (18).

One can read the journey down river as an attempt to achieve a harmonious relationship with nature, the wild, that which exists outside of society and the urban landscape in which the men live and work. While mapping out the journey, Lewis states, “all this in here will be blue. The dam at Aintry has already been started, and when it’s finished next spring the river will back up fast. This whole valley will be under water. But right now it’s wild. And I mean wild; it looks like something up in Alaska. We really ought to go up there before the real estate people get hold of it and make it over into one of their heavens” (3-4). However, there is also a desire to beat or dominate the natural landscape by conquering the wild river. Ed, when discussing Lewis’s drive and obsessions, states,

Lewis wanted to be immortal. He had everything that life could give, and he couldn’t make it work. And he couldn’t bear to give it up or see age take it away from him, either, because in the meantime he might be able to find what it was he wanted, the thing that must be there, and that must be subject to the will. He was the kind of man who tries by any means - weight lifting, diet, exercise, self-help manuals from taxidermy to modern art - to hold on to his body and mind and improve them, to rise above time. (9)

Unlike the guitar and banjo, the bow is Ed’s instrument of choice to survive and dominate the landscape. In a passage that can also be read as a transformative moment for Ed, he lies in the crevice of a stone as though he “were in a sideways grave” (169). As he wonders where he can start, Ed tells himself, “You can start with the bow, and work slowly into the situation, working back and working up. I held the bow as tightly as I could, coming by degrees into the realization that I was going to have to risk it again, before much longer. But not now. Let the river run” (170). The key to Ed’s survival, then, is his bow and not the human body, as Lewis suggests. 

However, there is a relationship between Ed’s body and his bow. While we can read the relationship between Ed and his bow as one in which Ed acts and the bow reacts, in a later passage, in which Ed kills a local he believes to be the man hunting them, the arrow attached to the bow pierces his side. Ed states, “it was in me. In me. The flesh around the metal moved pitifully, like a mouth, when I moved the shaft [...] The shaft would come; I moved it through me a little more, and the wound changed. The bloody shaft was in my hands, and my side was oozing and pouring down the rock. I went down after it, the arrow still in my hands, and stood up. There had never been a freedom like it. The pain itself was freedom, and the blood” (195). This passage allows us to not only see the language of rape and homoeroticism that permeates the text, but also within this language there is a masochistic element that seems to give Ed a sense of freedom. 

The freedom to control instead of mere hope. As Ed says, quoting Lewis, “we’ve got to do more than hope. Control, baby. It can be controlled. So give me back the story” (228).  

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The Sahara of the Bozart

H.L. Mencken (1917)

“The Ur - Confederate had leisure. He liked to toy with ideas. He was hospitable and tolerant. He had the vague thing that we call culture [...] It is as if the Civil War stamped out every last bearer of the torch, and left only a mob of peasants on the field” (230).

Mencken uses the term used by Jim to describe Huck. Mencken states, “The old aristocracy went down the red gullet of war; the poor white trash are now in the saddle” (231).

Dickey seems to agree with Mencken, particularly when thinking about the setting of his 1970 novel, Deliverance, the Appalachian South. 

The main idea of Mencken’s article, as we see in the previous quotes, is that the Civil War drained the South “of all its best blood,” the aristocracy of the old south, a leisure class with ideas and culture (233). This “blood-letting.” as Mencken calls it, led to an exodus of this aristocracy, leaving the south to the “harsh mercies of the poor white trash, now its masters” (233).

“As a result of this preference of the southern gentry for mulatto mistresses there was created a series of mixed strains containing the best white blood of the south, and perhaps of the whole country” (237).

Also, think about:

I’ll Take My Stand (1930)

The Mind of the South (1941)      

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Trash and Slavery in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Jim looked at the trash, and then looked at me, and back at the trash again. He had got the dream fixed so strong in his head that he couldn’t seem to shake it loose and get the facts back into its place again, right away. But when he did get the thing straightened around, he looked at me steady, without ever smiling, and says:

‘What do dey stan’ for? I’s gwyne to tell you. When I got all wore out wid work, en wid de callin’ for you, en went to sleep, my heart wuz mos’ broke bekase you wuz los’, en I didn’t k’yer no mo’ what become er me en da raf’. En when I wake up en fine you back agin’, all safe en soun’, de tears come en I could a got down on my knees en kiss’ yo’ foot I’s so thankful. En all you wuz thinkin ‘bout wuz how you could make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie. Dat truck dah is trash; en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren’s en makes ‘em ashamed’ (100).

Shelley Fisher Fishkin, in her book Was Huck Black?: Mark Twain and African-American Voices, builds on the research of Richard Bridgman by not only acknowledging Huck’s speech pattern in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but also showing how Huck’s speech pattern matches the African American voice in Twain’s 1874 article “Sociable Jimmy.” One element of Huck’s speech that both Bridgman and Fishkin identify is the repetition of words and phrases. In the above passage, in which Huck, after playing a prank on Jim, asks Jim to interpret the “leaves and rubbish on the raft, and the smashed oar” (100), we see Huck repeat the word “trash,” as he describes Jim working through his interpretation. Jim, then, makes a comparison between the broken things and rubbish on the raft and someone who puts dirt on the head of his friends and makes them ashamed. On the one hand, we can read Jim’s speech as an allusion to Huck’s socioeconomic position, his position as the poor white son of the town drunk, “white trash.” On the other hand, I think it is important to think of the things in this passage, in order to see Jim’s metaphor more clearly.

While most of “these things” (100), as Huck refers to them, are dirt, leaves, and rubbish, the one object that Huck calls attention to is the “smashed oar.” The oar is important, particularly when looking at the raft as an instrument of escape, much like Whitehead’s train in The Underground Railroad. The oar is not only the object used to steer the raft, but is also that which creates movement and the sound of movement throughout the novel (**). Therefore, it is an instrument that allows Jim and Huck to control the raft and only becomes trash when it is broken and cannot be used as it was intended. However, as we see in the hair-ball scene, trash and discarded things are often given symbolic meaning by Jim. He uses the hair-ball, which was taken from the “fourth stomach of an ox,” to do magic. According to Jim, “there was a spirit inside of it, and it knowed everything” (44-45). After receiving a counterfeit quarter from Huck and putting it under the hair-ball, Jim tells Huck his fortune. There’s value (not monetary / economic) in both the counterfeit quarter and the hair-ball, a supernatural value that allows Jim to impart a lesson to Huck. Much like the hair-ball, Jim assigns symbolic meaning and value to the “trash” on the raft and once again teaches Huck a lesson.

After Jim’s lesson, Huck says,

Then he got up slow, and walked to the wigwam, and went in there, without saying anything but that. But that was enough. It made me feel so mean I could almost kiss his foot to get him to take it back.

It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to a nigger - but I done it, and I warn’t ever sorry for it afterwards, neither. I didn’t do him no more mean tricks, and I wouldn’t done that one if I’d a knowed it would make him feel that way. (100)

The first paragraph of this passage allows us to see that Huck is willing to renounce his feelings of white superiority, or almost willing may be a better way to put it, seeing that Huck says he “could almost kiss” Jim’s foot. Comparing Jim’s speech to Huck’s, we see a slight difference, in that Jim says, “I could a got down on my knees an kiss yo foot” (100). Both statements contain the hypothetical “could,” but only Huck’s statement contains “almost,” an indication that there is a rhetorical threshold that Huck is not willing to cross. 

By contemplating his actions and how they affect Jim, Huck is humanizing Jim, who, up until this point, has simply been Miss Watson’s property, a slave, an object used for labor in much the same way that the oar is an object of labor. 

These connections between Huck, Jim, used objects of labor, trash, and the slave system are important when looking at the relationship between poor whites and antebellum / reconstruction blacks. Michael Eric Dyson discusses this relationship in his article “Giving Whiteness a Black Eye,” stating,

Despite their economic disadvantage, poor white workers appealed to the surplus value that their whiteness allowed them to accumulate in the political economy of race. Many poor workers invested their surplus valued whiteness into a fund of psychic protection against the perverse, impure meanings of blackness. They drew from their value-added whiteness to not only boost their self esteem but to assert their relative racial superiority by means of what may be termed a negative inculpability: Poor Whites derived pleasure and some cultural benefit by not being a nigger. (118)

Huck, even though he is at the bottom of the social ladder in need of culture and “sivilizing,” still feels superior to Jim and has to work up the humility to humble himself. However, even after Huck humbles himself to Jim, he still sees him as a piece of property, saying, “I tried to make out to myself that I warn’t to blame, because I didn’t run Jim off from his rightful owner” (101).

Huck’s father, Pap, also allows us to see this superiority of whiteness that poor whites held onto, in spite of their economic disadvantages. Pap, while talking to Huck about a free African American college professor from Ohio, states, “why, he wouldn’t a give me the road if I hadn’t shoved him out o’ the way. I says to the people why ain’t this nigger put up at auction and sold?” (53).

Therefore, when Huck says, “All right, then, I’ll go to hell” (202), he is resisting this thinking of his father and a society that see Jim as an object for labor. However, as many critics have pointed out, the ending forces Jim back into the role of object, not an object of labor, though, an object that allows Tom and Huck to play out their adventure fantasy. Leo Marx states, “This creature who bleeds ink and feels no pain is something less than human. He has been made over in the image of a flat stereotype: the submissive stage-Negro. These antics divest Him, as well as Huck, of much of his dignity and individuality” (296). 

Andrew Levy, in his book Huck Finn’s America points out that Mark Twain himself believed in the reinvention of history, stating, “In his essays, he frequently found ways to argue that the sins and virtues of one era or country reinvent themselves in others” (xxiv). In this novel, we end where we began. In the last sentence, Huck states, “I been there before” (265). Levy states, “We misread Huck Finn, on matters of race and children especially, for the same reason we repeat the cultural and political schema of the Gilded Age - because the appealing idea that every generation is better off than the one before conceals our foreboding that we live in a land of echoes” (xxiv).