Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Ed Gentry

Abstract

In his controversial essay Come Back to Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey! (1948), Leslie Fiedler sees in tales of men alone in wilderness an archetype of American experience. If in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) and other nineteenth-century American classics the mythic America is boyhood as Fiedler claims (5), James Dickey's 1970 novel Deliverance presents middle-aged men trying unsuccessfully to reclaim this lost authentic self. Like Twain's novel, Deliverance centers on men floating down a river, but in this twentieth-century version, environment refuses to restore an uncorrupt identity. Fiedler sees Twain's river as a mythic conception of American identity as well as a metaphor for Self. While drawing on themes, structures, and symbols similar to those in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Deliverance reveals a more complex conception of society and self, one more closely resembling a post-structuralist model, particularly with regard to gender and sexuality. Whereas Huckleberry Finn heads out to new territory in order to free himself of scripts of his society, Dickey's novel suggests that there is no free territory and, as Judith Butler would confirm with regard to identity, perhaps there never was. In Deliverance others through whom protagonists consciously or unconsciously confront hidden aspects of themselves are not African American, like Jim in Huckleberry Finn, but poor white mountain folk. The novel links these hillbillies to their natural setting; they are, in a sense, violated nature responding with violation. The violation mountain men enact is a violent homosexual rape, suggesting that modern man has raped land and is now suffering nature's retribution. However, extending metaphor further with aid of Fiedler, nature (including hillbillies) becomes a part of protagonist's self, a violated self responding with violation. The rape is violent eruption of homosexual desire that, despite protagonists' refusal to acknowledge it, underlies trip from beginning; Deliverance, therefore, presents a more overtly sexual dynamic that replaces mainly homosocial bonds Fiedler sees underlying The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and other texts. Deliverance reveals that psyche has been violated through repression and denial of homoeroticism that becomes glaringly obvious to readers but to which characters seem either oblivious or openly hostile. Dickey does not allow his protagonist to successfully embrace alienated Other/unaccepted Self way Fiedler believes that Twain does. The novel's suggestion that there is no time of innocence, no unscripted self, to which one can return, carries with it an implied criticism of naive optimism of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, especially as read by Fiedler, most likely a criticism that Dickey did not consciously intend. As author said when discussing literary interpretations of his work, can't say that these things that they [critics] see in my work aren't there. I didn't intend some of them--... I didn't consciously intend a lot of them. But sometimes I did.... But when a thing is gone, when it's on paper and goes out into public domain, then it's gone (Davis 20-21). In same interview, Dickey adds, When somebody says that he loves somebody else, a man loves a woman, say ..., for somebody to cut in on that and tell me why I do, and analyze my motives for doing it, what I hope to gain by it, and what I hope to compensate for, overcompensate for, what degrees of guilt there are in connection with it and so on--I get very uneasy and also a little bit angry (Davis 22). Dickey would no doubt disapprove of following reading of Deliverance, but uneasiness and anger he admits resemble some of unconscious regulatory devices discussed herein. Most readers likewise do not believe that Twain intended homoeroticism that Fiedler points out in his novel. …