‘Does Anybody Know Anything About the Law?’: White Male Suburbanites in the Wilderness and Their Regression to the State of Nature in James Dickey’s Deliverance

This chapter is a close critical reading of the novel Deliverance (Dickey in Deliverance. Delta, 1970) by James Dickey from the perspective of law-and-literature. It employs the critical literary theory of Rene Girard in suggesting that Deliverance may be usefully understood as an interrogation, or even a satire, of the Hobbesian doctrine of the social contract. Whereas Hobbes raises the possibility, but then conspicuously fails to adequately theorize, the concept of the ‘little Monarchy’ or the private sovereignty of one man in the wilderness, Deliverance is premised upon both the feasibility and the desirability of man-the-hunter-as-sovereign-in-the-wilderness. A close reading of the novel reveals the employment of a number of critical notions of Girard—the crisis of undifferentiation, conflictual mimesis, the monstrous doubles—that collectively serve to undermine the facile assumption of the universality of the social contract as well as any clear demarcation between the realms of sovereignty and homicide, law and crime.