Exceptional Infidelity: James Dickey’s Deliverance, Film Adaptation, and the Postsouthern

BENJAMIN J. MURPHY University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Exceptional Infidelity: James Dickey’s Deliverance, Film Adaptation, and the Postsouthern And all the while that he’d been writing the book, he’d been thinking of what the movie might be. —.Christopher Dickey, Summer of Deliverance (162) MENTION DELIVERANCE AND THERE ARE TWO RESPONSES YOU MIGHT expect: someone will begin vocally trilling a bluegrass banjo melody or someone will grimace while recounting that line from the rape scene: “Squeal like a pig!” Both responses stem from John Boorman’s 1972 film adaptation of Deliverance rather than James Dickey’s original 1970 novel.1 While a banjo-guitar duet does play a prominent role in Dickey’s novel, the song that the characters in the novel play is a nineteenthcentury folk tune, “Wildwood Flower,” not the considerably newer “Dueling Banjos” that was popularized by the film. And while Dickey’s novel certainly involves the rape of an Atlanta businessman by a rural Georgian man, the infamous “Squeal like a pig!” line does not appear in either the original novel or Dickey’s screenplay.2 In the popular imagination, Deliverance. persists more as a film than as a novel. Of course, in accruing more staying power on the screen than on the page, Deliverance is hardly unique. The early 1970s alone saw a slew of popular adaptations that chart the same trajectory. All released within several years of their respective source novels, The Godfather (1972), The Exorcist (1973), and Jaws (1975) join Deliverance in eclipsing their literary predecessors. What makes Dickey’s Deliverance and the story of its adaptation exceptional, however, is the way that the novel seems 1 I detect both responses lurking in the phrase “Paddle faster, I hear banjos!,” a bumper sticker line cited so frequently in Deliverance. scholarship that it seems more ubiquitous in prose than in the real world of car décor. See, for example, Leiter 1; Satterwhite 175; Silver 371; Vernon, “Strange Agrarianisms” manuscript 1. 2 See Anthony Harkins for a discussion of the different songs featured in the two versions of Deliverance and of the addition of the infamous line (208). Brian Hoyle points out that this added line was absent from both Dickey’s novel and his script (77). 206 Benjamin J. Murphy to have seen this fate coming. In more ways than one, Deliverance was filmic from the start. To begin with, as Steven G. Kellman and others have pointed out, Dickey’s novel anticipates its later adaptation by being conventionally “cinematic”: matching the macho heroics of canoeing, hunting, and murder with the lush, forested setting, the novel is an adventure thriller fit for the big screen.3 Dickey himself certainly believed his first novel had tremendous Hollywood potential, and, as his son Christopher remembers it, wrote with this potential very much in mind, all the while thinking about “what the movie might be” (.C. Dickey 162). But if Dickey’s first novelistic foray from poetry into fiction was felicitously and intentionally ripe for filming from its inception, a closer look at Deliverance also reveals a more vexed relationship to the medium that would adapt it. Dickey’s novel not only anticipates but actually addresses, critiques, and attenuates the adaptation that would supersede it. Evincing an anxiety of adaptation, the novel fixates on visual media as a matter of thematic and aesthetic concern. Evidenced in part by recurring references to film and television, the novel’s visual media obsession is affixed to Ed Gentry’s first-person narration. An uninspired artistic director of an advertising firm—a self-described “mechanic of the graphic arts” (Deliverance. 26)—Ed narrates in terms of television and film plots, clichés, camera footage, and post-production effects, and he makes numerous references to specific films and actors throughout the novel. That key elements of Deliverance are filtered through this mesh of visual media is striking considering that the novel focuses on four suburban men who wish to find authenticity and “deliverance” in an ostensibly wholesome wilderness, a place that they initially believe will offer rugged reprieve from their feminized lives of comfort and entertainment. Why, we might ask, does a novel that eschews modern amenities...