Walker Percy
LeClair, Thomas
In need of critical judgment WALKEB PERCY An American Search Robert Coles Little,Brown, $12.50, 250 pp. Thomas LeClair WALKER PERCY and Robert Coles, though men of great learning, have for...
...It is his refusal to transform, to substitute concepts for consciousness, that drew Coles to Percy's fiction...
...In 1961 The Moviegoer was published and won the National Book Award...
...Walker Percy is what Wallace Stevens called "The impossible possible philosophers' man,/The man who has had the time to think enough,/The central man...
...To get through the background, the first half of the book, the reader would have to know Percy's novels, yet when Coles discusses the novels he writes as though the reader was not familiar with them...
...Percy moved back to the South and took up as his full-time occupation thinking some more...
...he allows them their lives...
...Coles's primary methods are summary and quotation...
...The way Coles describes it, Percy's fiction doesn't have the intricacy and originality that would support—and ultimately defy—analysis...
...But in his concern to avoid a critical takeover of Percy's texts, Coles forgets who his reader might be...
...While doing residency in pathology at New York's Bellevue Hospital in 1941, Percy contracted tuberculosis and spent the next four years recovering, reading philosophy, thinking...
...Coles's profile of Percy the man, composed of long passages from interviews and Coles's observations, and his chapters on Percy's philosophical background and essays are 15 February 1980: 91 excellent...
...To succeed in the kind of admiring response that Coles chooses, one should, as Roland Barthes does, speak in as well as about the texts...
...Although Percy is an important writer of uneven quality, Coles does not want to judge and does not want to do the kind of literary analysis that would allow him to judge, to discriminate among Percy's works...
...Thomas LeClair WALKER PERCY and Robert Coles, though men of great learning, have for many years fought the tyranny of analysis, the dissolving of individual, concrete, time-bound experience into the analytic categories of psychologists, sociologists and philosophers...
...But the novels deserve a thoroughness, subtlety and, finally, critical judgment Coles is either unwilling or unable to provide...
...The best of Walker Percy's novels have a mysterious particularity that resists the names —"Southern," "Catholic," "Existential"—that would familiarize the books...
...Even Percy's essays have an engaging inconclusiveness...
...For all of its enthusiasm and respect, Walker Percy: An American Search is curiously monaural...
...Percy is "the central man'' because he has set down his consciousness among the largest issues of our time: religious loss, cultural conflict, alienation, apocalypse...
...In his best fiction, The Moviegoer and The Last Gentleman, Percy allows his attentive consciousness a freedom to gather multiple specimens of our strange, death-haunted, death-defying U.S.A...
...Reading it, one comes to appreciate more fully Percy's artistic achievement because it has exceeded the grasp of an intelligent and sympathetic critic...
...Commonweal: 92...
...Percy thinks of himself as a Martian wandering over and wondering about the surface of our Earth...
...Coles knows one of Percy's languages—the language of existential psychiatry—but Percy has other tongues Coles does not hear or speak...
...To avoid the pseudo-objectivity of criticism, Coles writes as a "spiritual kinsman," a man on a parallel track...
...But in attempting to write a non-imperial "response" to Percy's work, Coles has produced a book generous in intention but finally not worthy of its subject...
...They are adequate, even admirable, for the humane sociologist or psychiatrist, but these methods simplify rather than honor the complexity of art...
...When he is more purposeful, as he is in Love in the Ruins and Lancelot, the knowledge of lives that characterizes his earlier work turns into understanding of life, exploration becomes edification...
...During the middle 1950s he wrote essays on philosophy, linguistics and culture for a number of magazines including Commonweal...
...Again, in whatever guise, it's the expert up front...
...Robert Coles lets the people in the Children of Crisis books talk...
...Coles calls Percy's thirty years of thinking about these subjects "An American Search," but I think exploration is more precise...
...Since then Percy has published three other novels— The Last Gentleman, Love in the Ruins and Lancelot—and a collection of essays, The Message in the Bottle...
...If Percy's fiction has been "over-analyzed," as Coles claims, the best of it refuses certainty and recovers itself...
Vol. 107 • February 1980 • No. 3
