HERO TRIP: DIVINE RIGHT'S JOURNEY OF SELF

Gurney Norman's Appalachian epic Divine Right's Trip first appeared in Last Whole Earth Catalog in 1971. Norman had hatched a plot with Stewart Brand to write a novel whose hero would use products advertised in the Catalog. Eventually, Norman refused to be held by these artistic constraints, as Ed McClanahan explains in the afterword to the novel (306). Rather than following the random placement of hippy wares in the catalog, Norman created a story whose hero is the acid-addled cousin of Huck Finn and Stephan Dedalus on a journey that reconciles his dissociated selves: Divine Right and David Ray. novel is preceded by three epigraphs: a quotation from Joseph Campbell summarizing the epic journey of the hero; James 1:8, A man is unstable in all his ways; and finally from the Tao, The surest test if a man is is if he life whole, as it is. Norman has given readers a clue to one of the novel's many meanings by beginning the story with these three enigmatic quotations. Campbell's cyclical heroic journey consists, as he explains in Hero with a Thousand Faces, of separation, initiation, and return (30). epigraphs then are a puzzle that once solved will illuminate the text. At the beginning of D.R.'s heroic journey he is a double-minded man, hence the scripture; however, D. R. is, by story's end, sane by the definition put forth by the Book of Tao because he accepts life whole, as it is. appearance of the two scriptures just after the title page and their inclusion in the wedding ceremony at the end of the book frame the story just as Campbell's model of the hero journey frames it. Campbell's model is a circular one, beginning with the call, then a crossing over the threshold of adventure to oppose a foe, in D.R.'s case a dragon he himself has created. As Campbell explains: