Content area
Full Text
TO THE WHITE SEA, James Dickey's third novel, achieves perhaps as much a summing-up of the milestones and peak moments in its author's best poems as did Yeats's "The Circus Animals' Desertion," also written in late career. Within the work's horrific narrative labyrinth are numerous passages that offer a retrospective survey of Dickey's hard-earned poetic mythologies, his achieved personal mythos. The book links the poet's favorite creeds, lores, and mystiques for an advance into his autumnal grasp that both contains and soars beyond them. Further, in its grappling with the key myths of Dickey's major poems, this book's spiritual dimension pulls together the diverse strands of his pantheism, composing a religio-philosophic credo that recalls Yeats's formulation of his own mature (and occult) mythos in A Vision. Throughout To the White Sea the reader is struck by eloquent forays into homemade theories of optics, physics, and aesthetics and into the esoteric lore of icebergs and arctic predators . . . all of which, taken together, quietly adds up to a fascinating and innovative treatise of natural philosophy. True to his mentor Lucretius, Dickey in To the White Sea adorns naive scientific inquiry with painstakingly exact poetic imagemaking. His prose style never departs from the plain idiom of common speech-and yet he manages an uncannily precise descriptive power and a musical lyricism, both of these filtered through his secret amanuensis, Sergeant Muldrow, a character who serves as a kind of contemplative mouthpiece for the author and who embodies many of the wisdoms and lessons of Dickey's poetry. I take this aspect of Muldrow to be the source of his elation and, finally, of his abiding faith in survival. I Donald Armstrong, the heroic protagonist of "The Performance," was Muldrow's earliest forerunner. Perfection of his acrobatics, highspirited gymnastic tricks, gave Armstrong access to a sacred mind-space that enabled him to transcend the horror of his own beheading: Yet I put my flat hand to my eyebrows Months later, to see him again In the sun, when I learned how he died, And imagined him, there, Come, judged, before his small captors, Doing all his lean tricks to amaze themThe back somersault, the kip-upAnd at last, the stand on his hands, Perfect, with his feet together, His head down,...