WALKER PERCY AND THE SELF
Taylor, Lewis Jerome Jr.
WALKER PERCY AND THE SELF LEWIS JEROME TAYLOR, JR. The problems of the times and the failure of the individual Walker Percy is no stranger to the readers of Commonweal, and yet he bears repeated...
...The blacks, known as Bantus, are organizing for all-out guerrilla war to take over from the whites, who for all their Christian talk have failed them as human beings...
...Catastrophe can, like a mighty wind, blow away the abstracting veils of theory and ideology and enable his own sovereign seeing...
...More specifically, as it appears in Percy's heroes, it is plainly what Kierkegaard calls the "movement of infinite resignation...
...Percy must be either chortling in his beer or shaking in his boots---or both--as he reads his newspaper today, three years after the publication of this book...
...We can't...
...It is not, however, knowledge about reality as such that primarily concerns him but the way by which a person can come to himself and begin to live his own life...
...A.--"The successor of Jean-Paul Sartre...
...15] Within an hour he is on a bus bound for New York City and launched upon a serious quest, at the end of which he will recover himself and be able for the first time to live in the "lovely ordinary world...
...Percy has a keen awareness of the dissolution of things...
...He has received back everything that he had resigned and more, because at last he has acquired himsell...
...Percy's "caricatures" are large and very entertaining, but above all they are concerned to communicate a most serious message...
...One bright football weekend despair is so pressing upon Will that he feels as if he is moving around like a sloth...
...Doris, who "began life as a cheerful Episcopalian from Virginia, became a priestess of the high places . . . 'But we don't relate,' said Doris absently, still not leaving though, eyes fixed on St...
...As Percy puts it, a man is "neither a beast nor an angel but a wayfaring creature somewhere between...
...When the canary gets unhappy, utters plaintive cries and collapses it may be time for the miners to surface and think things over...
...Cars are left rusting in parking lots because there is no one to fix them...
...14] He loses himself in all manner of proper Princetonianisms, but fortunately he is not allowed to get away with it...
...When we commit ourselves, there is always an underlying hidden fear...
...He allows the idea to intervene and claim his attention, thus losing his sovereign power to see...
...Both Percy and Kierkegaard are centrally concerned with one vital question...
...He saw it most clearly...
...Because of this, a person becomes lost to himself, he is barely able to experience himself as a self, he lives outside of himself and does not know who he is...
...10 May 1974:236...
...Many young people have dropped out altogether and are living a detached kind of unreality of their own in the swamp...
...We come upon Tom More five years later: "Hoeing collards in my kitchen garden . . . . After hoeing a row: sit in the sunny corner, stretch out my legs and look at my boots...
...Obsessed by a single theme, the German problem, he is the first writer from his country since Thomas Mann in 1929 to have received one year ago, the highest international literary distinction--the Nobel prize...
...Walker Percy is a Catholic who specifically asserts his belief in the Christian understanding of man and salvation...
...Like Graham Greene's whiskey priest, he has his own aesthetic crutches---alcohol, girls, and ambition, but he does not allow these to interfere with his central task...
...A veil of abstractions comes between the person and the reality that is there before him...
...This is no place for me for another half hour, let alone two years...
...Used with permission...
...At last, and despite himself, he uttered a loud groan, which startled him and momentarily silenced his classmates...
...One caveat may be appropriate with regard to Percy's work...
...Percy is an existentialist...
...Goods and services are breaking down...
...Hm', he muttered and peered at his eyeballs in the mirror...
...then coming forward to Heidegger and Marcel...
...The first movement goes to the point where all normal societal and other life supports have been stripped away...
...Perhaps his overly schematized presentation is necessary in order that a blind age may get the point...
...One feels the urging within himself of possibility, but he is restricted by his own particularity of place, history and genes...
...328] Loss of self to expert theory and ideology is not the only evasion of the angst as Percy is well aware...
...Such a break came for him when he contracted pulmonary tuberculosis while working as a medical intern in New York City and had to spend two "enforced years" in the Adirondacks...
...He senses the ultimacy of the challenge to act upon his own and that somehow for him this is a life-or-death matter...
...On the eve of giving up the international presidency of P.E.N...
...He is a "castaway," a "wayfarer...
...But then it is precisely his outcast, apparently sick condition that renders him serviceable to the various and assorted Bantus, lovecouples, and drugheads who gravitate to him alone for medical help...
...Where Were You, Adam...
...Decidedly not, in Percy's view, as his novels clearly show...
...the fear of those who know how things can change from one day to another...
...But is this all there is to authentic selfhood?--struggle, resignation and suffering...
...He is not allowing himself to live because to do so is too risky...
...In the face of such a challenge held out by freedom he is anxious, and it is his attempt to evade this natural anxiety that leads him to the diversion of the moment...
...When the reader meets him Dr...
...Percy explicitly identifies this phase of the process of self-recovery with what Kierkegaard broadly calls the "religious stage...
...It is by the grace of catastrophe that a person can come to himself and see what is before him as if for the first time...
...Dr...
...He compares himself to the canary that coal miners used to take down into the shaft to see if the atmosphere were livable...
...It is by means of his fictional beings that he portrays the movements to selfhood, as he understands the way in which these take place...
...The cardinal instrument by which one can cease floating passively on all manner of external attractions can be summed up in one key word in Percy's vocabulary: catastrophe...
...Today, reinforcing Jean-Paul Sartre in the international positions he takes (and with his recent intervention This interview by Jean-Louis de Rambures first appeared in the French daily, le Monde on December 13, 1973...
...On the contrary, I am more delighted with every day that passes to have received it...
...Percy has keen and perceptive eyes for the despair underlying the increasing disarray of society, its root cause and its possible cure...
...64, 66] She is so captured by her idea of the way their love should be, as proclaimed by the religious and behavioral experts, that she can no longer see and thereby love the concrete Tom...
...In each of Percy's novels this action is made possible by the combination of two things: the final collapse of normal life-supports and the concrete presence of another person whom he sees as if for the first time...
...i II HEINRICH BOLL ON WORK, FAITH, GERMANY AN INTERVIEW The new conception of the committed writer who is "Made in Germany' Heinrich B611's career is, in its way, a German literary miracle...
...vines, which only he can see, are coming up through the cracks in the streets and sidewalks and sprouting everywhere...
...Examples abound in Percy's fiction, and they are at the same time humorously presented and chillingly eerie in their import...
...Oh, not from personal vanity...
...Will Barrett's mouth dropped open when the final recognition took place and he saw Sutter no longer as his answer but as his responsibility...
...And then later going back to Kierkegaard and LEWIS JEROME TAYLOR, JR., is a pro/essor o/ theology at Saint Andrew's Theological Seminary in the Philippines...
...The initial break, however, by no means constitutes the attainment of selfhood...
...It is precisely at this moment of second catastrophe that he is enabled to make the final movement to selfhood...
...is in a state of rapidly accelerating ruin...
...Thomas More, the protagonist in his latest novel, Love in the Ruins, is a middle-aged, rather shaky psychiatrist who sees what others do not, that most people, though going through many motions, are really "dead, dead, dead...
...But suppose he fails...
...Whatever have been our past mistakes, we have never been spoiled...
...The hero has progressively put all else aside in pursuit of his mission, but finally the mission itself comes crashing around his ears...
...A French intellectual who commits himself has a long humanist tradition to lean upon...
...In an age in which the credentials of science are erroneously believed to apply to all sectors of reality, the temptation becomes strong...
...Tom More experiences the problem as it profoundly affects his relationship with his wife...
...The Two Sacraments...
...Francis who was swarming with titmice...
...Should he not make it clear, as did Kierkegaard, that one does not leave one stage behind and move, once and for all, from essential non-selfhood to essential selfhood...
...Because of the way we are made...
...in order to devote himself once more entirely to his writing, Heinrich B/311 discussed this new conception with Jean-Louis de Rambures...
...He experiences more acutely than most the horror of the deep subterranean flaw underlying the surface "niceness" of everyone and uses his novels to warn his fellows...
...On one occasion, while walking along the road, he is hailed by a colleague, Dr...
...And yet, again surprisingly, he retains a basically conservative orientation along with the fresh view that continually questions it...
...Percy, with compassion and without sentimentality or the mannerisms of the clinic, examines the delusions and hallucinations and the daydreams and the dreads that afflict those who abstain from the customary ways of making do...
...In Percy's view there is a particular manifestation of this evasive movement which is increasingly seductive to the present scientistic age...
...A delightful thing about him, and one that continually carries over into his fictional characters, is that he is a man of surprises, which is to say that he is a man who seems somehow to have moved into the realm of freedom...
...A novelist whose entire work (his chief novels are: Bogner, Go Home...
...Tom alone really sees it, but he must endure the suffering of not being able to communicate what he sees to his neighbors...
...An example can be seen in the fact that abstract theories are increasingly applied to human relationships...
...The essential human failing, then, is that of allowing oneself to be seduced by the magical charms of externals, whether these come in the more obvious pleasures of sex, the anesthesia of "miles and miles of T.V...
...The teap of faith, Kierkegaard warned, must be continually re-made...
...Percy observes that this is the layman's way of falling into what Alfred North Whitehead terms "The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness...
...A dangerous polarization has set in, and rightist Knotheads and Leftist Leftpapasans are at each other's throats...
...He also specifically acknowledges that he sees his mission as a writer as that of conveying the Christian truth to an age for which the traditional words have worn so smooth that they no longer take effect...
...The hero resigns the comfort of living as one of "the crowd...
...He recognizes them all, pomposity, status-seeking, simple greed and lust, and describes them with wry and perceptive humor...
...in favor of Soviet intellectuals), Heinrich Btill personifies a new conception of the committed writer who is "Made in Germany...
...The point of it all in each story is that the final movement to self-recovery comes unexpectedly, and, as it were, from the outside...
...He is in despair, and the worst kind of despair is that which is so successfully covered up by diversion that one is hardly aware of it...
...Instead, he adopts the others' "certain Princeton way of talking . . . sticking their hands in their pockets and settling their chins in their throats...
...Empty highways...
...U.S.A...
...Because of his inability effectively to relate what he sees to the inhabitants of another existence mode, he is considered to be slightly mad, even though lovably so...
...This description of the way to faith has obvious significance for an age described by Bonhoeffer as one in which it is not possible for man to be religious any more...
...Whenever this canary utters his plaintive-humorous-hopeful cry again, there will certainly be those who are intent to listen...
...Percy describes both kinds...
...Tom's preteenage daughter, Samantha, whom he loved very much, died of a neuroblastoma, and Doris left him for an abstracting Englishman...
...Simply because I am German...
...The translation is by Anne Fremantle...
...Existentialist that he is, Percy traces the problem of the times not to faulty societal or economic structures, but to failure of the individual...
...The Grimace...
...Thomas More's initial break with immediacy was made prior to the opening of the narrative and was enabled, in his case, by external catastrophe...
...Man is not at home on his earth-island as the animals are...
...And yet, "Before I know what I'm doing I'm grinning too and hopping around to the door with every appearance of delight...
...You forget one thing...
...Dusty Rhoades, with whom he is not on the best of terms...
...374] The brief description of the hero's life following this Commonweal: 235 dramatic recovery of self is, in each story, a picture of willingness to live in the world from which he had initially broken in despair...
...There are certain things the French can permit themselves because they are a trifle spoiled...
...Because of the structure of our human nature, says Percy...
...Percy's chief mission in his writings is to do a little ass-kicking or, as he says, to provide "vicarious catastrophe" so that his reader may be enabled to acknowledge his castaway condition sufficiently to embark upon a search of his own...
...The "thunderstorm breaks," to use Kierkegaard's memorable phrase, and he is aware of himself in his "eternal validity" as ultimately responsible for that person...
...nobody wanted to be a repairman...
...Group Portrait with Lady) is located in a very circumscribed area around Cologne...
...Rightist guerrilla warriors in Atlanta...
...More is a bit shaky but, nevertheless, he can see and act...
...Tom More falls victim repeatedly to impersonation in spite of the fact that he has essentially broken with evasive ways...
...As he recalls it, "I think it was probably through Sartre first, probably through reading Nausea...
...Life itself, he clearly implies, provides the means in and through concrete situations and events...
...While many, perhaps most, theological and even existentialist thinkers are content to probe the objective truth of human reality, Percy and the Danish "Father of Existentialism" are concerned with the vital question how...
...Watergate...
...It is rooted essentially in the universal human tendency to take the easy way of floating on the tide of external influences and thereby forfeiting one's sovereignty and the place on which one is given to stand...
...Similarly, Percy describes what happens in the broader social milieu when a person becomes so lost to himself "that he will fall prey to the first abstract notion proposed to him and will kill anybody who gets in his way, torture, execute, wipe out entire populations, all with the best possible motives and the best possible intentions, in fact, in the name of peace and freedom, et cetera...
...In their citation of The Moviegoer as winner of the 1962 National Book Award For Fiction the judges concluded with this revealing observation: "Mr...
...It is the need for an initial decisive break that Percy sees as central to the task of self-becoming...
...382] In these words and others like them, Percy is saying that there is a way to selfhood, the way of the quest which makes possible the final fulfillment...
...In each novel, there follows a long and lonely struggle which centrally involves responsibility to what the hero can now see...
...This is the temptation to forfeit one's sovereignty to "the experts...
...The problems of the times and the failure of the individual Walker Percy is no stranger to the readers of Commonweal, and yet he bears repeated introduction because of the significance of what he sees and what he has to say...
...Like Percy himself, he sees the radical dissolution of society...
...Why is this the human tendency...
...Will Barrett, for example, is an undergraduate at I0 May 1974:234 Princeton in the opening scenes of The Last Gentleman...
...The author comments, "Perhaps this moment more than any other, the moment of his first astonishment, marked the beginning for the engineer of what is called a normal life...
...In his epilogue to The Moviegoer he remarks that the time is late, that it is no longer possible to be edifying in the same way in which Kierkegaard was, unless "ass-kicking" can be considered edifying...
...It was then that he began to read the European existentialists...
...Children of the Dead...
...Yet, he is the most translated (into more than 20 languages), the most widely read, in the West as in the East (his USSR sales exceed a million) of any contemporary German...
...It is his single-minded effort to avert the impending doom that constitutes Tom's religious "movement of infinite resignation...
...Catastrophe can come in the form of increasing inner despair, as Kierkegaard primarily saw it, or in the form of external accident or event...
...This demurrer, however, should not minimize the significant contribution which Percy's insights made with regard to the way of selfhood...
...Commonweal: 233 [63] Dr...
...or movie tape," or in more subtle ways...
...How can one make the necessary movements that can take him from inauthentic to authentic existence...
...Paradise Estates is polarizing into two groups so gripped by their respective ideologies that the persons involved can hardly see each other...
...The problem is that this is a very uncomfortable state in which to live...
...He is in an in-between state...
...It is not a little thing, because, says Percy, it is in this way more than any other that selfhood is being eroded today...
...He quotes with approval Flannery O'Connor's reply to a question as to why she created such bizarre characters: "For the near-blind you have to draw very large simple caricatures...
...Fights among the poor receiving food extorted by kidnapping...
...He is, for the first time, able to begin upon a "search" which, though it takes different forms, has essentially the same characteristics for each protagonist...
...It is first of all in his philosophical position that one can see a clear instance of this, because it is here that he has made a decisive break with his past...
...381] "All any man needs is time and desire and the sense of his own sovereignty...
...Explicit god-consciousness is not a necessary characteristic of recovered selfhood as Percy portrays it, but it is clear that, in his view, the god-relationship has been restored...
...74] Thus, in many ways do the characters seek to avoid the pain of being what they really are--"wayfarers...
...If all of this is what it is to be dead, how does Percy see the possibility of coming alive...
...EuropeanExistentialist just does not fit with Southern-TraditionalConservative-Greek Classical, the atmosphere of the Mississippi home and person of his uncle, William Alexander Percy, who raised him...
...Modern man, Percy believes, tends more and more to let the expert's theory of what is true, most adequate, or real usurp his own ability to see and act for himself...
...Of particular significance is what he calls "impersonation"--the tendency to adapt like a chameleon to the other...
...unfortunately the theory tends to be regarded as more real than the relationship itself...
...But," he adds, "Kierkegaard is probably the one who deserves the most credit...
...I didn't, I haven't refused the Nobel prize...
...Despair, the inevitable result of self-forfeiture, intensifies until finally it enables a "moment" of awareness and a leap to an entirely new mode of existence...
...Is it a newspaper or another installment of Love in the Ruins that he has gotten his hands on...
...This is the impression that his writing may give that there are two categories of human beings: those who are "dead" and others who have gone the route of Tom More and are, perhaps, "alive...
Vol. 100 • May 1974 • No. 10
