Reviewing the 100 Best Novels of the 20th
Century
by Annette Ferran
Deliverance
What constitutes “the best” in novels? This is a question that came up again
and again for me as I read through the Modern Library’s list. I accepted at the outset, having
scanned the list before beginning to read, that the old familiar bias permeated
it—what has been popularly referred to as the “dead white men” bias. Even with this level of acceptance, #42
on the list, Deliverance, by James
Dickey, was shocking to me. And
not in a good way.
Deliverance is probably best known
through its film adaptation with Ned Beatty and Burt Reynolds representing the
opposite ends of the manliness spectrum. It is the story of a group of men
seeking to reconnect with or rekindle their masculinity. The narrator/protagonist is the
“sensitive” one, not especially weak but not especially virile either, eager to
test himself but not the one with the quasi-suicidal compulsions. It is a man’s
tale of a typical kind, in which the civilized man regains his self-identity by
confronting the challenge of violence presented by nature and by uncivilized
men.
This
novel also belongs to what I’ve come to recognize as a subgenre of
misogyny: an artistic backlash
against the growing feminism of the time, and most particularly against female
sexuality (see Straw Dogs for a
another stunning example).
An
iconic scene is that in which the least manly of the men is raped like a pig by
the subhuman men. As is revealed
in the last scene of the book, however—a scene mercifully or perhaps wisely
left out of the movie—his position wasn’t so much pig-like as woman-like. In
this last scene our sensitive protagonist returns home to his wife after this
harrowing, chest-hair-growing adventure and proceeds to screw her (vulgarity
intended), as is his right and duty, in a way that mimics his fellow traveler’s
ordeal. The author is not content
just to depict this parallel; the character himself remarks on it and defines
it. In this scene the author
commits not only an attitudinal sin but also a stylistic one. He might have left this parallel to us
readers to discern for ourselves.
The impression would have been just as
distasteful, but literarily it would not have been the club to the head that it
is.
This
novel is obscene—not merely pornographic, like Tropic of Cancer, but objectionable in its sex-based themes. Depicting the notion that men struggle
with their manliness is not enough, it seems. This novel has to do so at the
express expense of women.
Moreover, the sensitive man becomes fully male again only by embracing
extreme violence.
Deliverance was published in 1970. As it happens, so was a novel
powerfully influential in my reading life, The
Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison.
How this consciousness-shifting work was passed over while so many of
the white men, dead and alive, made the list is baffling.
The
story told in The Bluest Eye is
harrowing also, but this author’s understanding of humanity is deep and
compassionate (while also furious). Morrison’s novel is not shock-worthy but
rather, in its wisdom and eloquence, quite necessary.
I
intentionally gave away the key scenes of Deliverance. I don’t want anyone else to bother reading
this book. With your free time, go
read The Bluest Eye.
Annette Ferran
lives in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and works in Philadelphia as an editor
for a medical publisher. She is
also the Associate Editor for 10,000Tons of Black Ink, a Literary Writers Network publication. She has a
degree of dubious practical use, in German, and is a lifelong avid reader of
fiction and lover of lists. She has had a few short stories published, most
recently in RE:AL.
