Lost in the Cosmos:

...Percy exempts the Jews on the grounds that God will care for them, thereby removing the stumbling block that troubled Paul even more than the sophistication of the Greeks...

...The message, I should hasten to add, does not come in the style of contemporary Protestant evangelists Percy scorns...

...A small beam of hope illuminates the gloom, however, for Percy remains faithful to the least likely outcome of his scenario: a return to a particularly stark, and despite Catholic trappings, classically Protestant vision of salvation of the self through the shed blood of Jesus...

...By way of sealing his case, Percy presents two Space Odysseys...

...Though it aims to be a rhetorically tough, uncompromising defense of Christianity against a self-seeking world (and church) grown alien to its persona, Lost in the Cosmos is itself finally a self-indulgent fancy, not far off the mark of the self-help literature Percy parodies...

...In the final odyssey, the space voyagers return to a dead earth to ponder the options - all of them bleak including the one presented by a surviving Christian, one Abbott Liebowitz, who remains a witness to the Word (and perhaps the last pope by default), even after heaven and earth - at least earth - have passed away...

...In any case, I must confess to an inability to follow the argument that the "sign-user" remains forever beyond his own comprehension merely because of a semiotic technicality...

...A remnant may survive...

...A successful novelist - winner of a National Book Award in 1961 for The Moviegoer - Percy has in recent years turned to social and cultural criticism, having published The Message in the Bottle in 1975...

...Some genuinely "religious folk" may be found, he allows, "though for every Mother Teresa, there seem to be 1,800 nutty American nuns, female Clint Eastwoods who have it in for men and are out to get the Pope...

...Impervious to apocalyptic rhetoric followed by soft tearful altar calls, Percy's readers are likely to be skeptics and unbelievers to whom the Gospel is as foolish as it was to the Greeks in Paul's day...

...The result to date, according to Percy, can only be described as unrelieved boredom and disappointment for most individuals...

...Using the familiar materials of mass culture, from the pop quiz and facile questionnaire to the glib pop science speculations of a Carl Sagan, Percy pieces together his mosaic against modern men and women...

...This condemnation of the world is simply too facile, too sweeping, too final...

...Unable wholly to escape Southern Protestant traditions by an act of conversion or by the choice of a medical vocation, Percy chooses a literary avocation which only reinforces his unintended, and somewhat jaded, evangelical vision: whereas "the painter and the sculptor are the Catholics of art," possessing the advantage of tangible intermediaries between themselves and creation,"the writer," he declares, "is the Protestant...

...Though often hard on the reader's nerves, too, Lost in the Cosmos does not come off merely as a crypto-Protestant exercise, a dull, sincere gospel tract...

...the gap between our knowledge of the Cosmos and our knowledge of ourselves widens and we become even more alien to the very Cosmos we understand, and our predicament ever more extreme...

...More to the point, why should Walker Percy...

...Percy conveys the absurdity and dead-liness of the modern experiment in misused freedom through a parody of self-help literature, a parody which is by turns devastating and sophomoric, sharp-eyed and heavy-handed...

...Nothing could be closer to one of the mean spirits of our time, a spirit which is less pervasive, I think, than many critics contend, though nonetheless virulent enough not to require further care and feeding...

...in fact, with luck, the survivors might even manage to reinvent the destructive wheel of civilization, either on this shattered planet or at some distant site in the vast and lonely cosmos...

...I use the term amateur in its best sense here, to locate Percy in a small company of significant American writers who work on their own, without the sustained support of a university, a foundation, or the mass media...

...Similarly, his spoof on sexual excess cast in the form of the Last Phil Donahue Show exhibits flashes of satiric brilliance...

...No matter - the essential point survives its semiotic mutilation...

...should Walker Percy...

...In a word, Percy finds no redeeming value in people, politics, culture or, for the most part, religion...

...The modern Greeks, Percy suggests, would rather be put out of their misery than accept his endorsement of the "preposterous" Christian vision of salvation...

...As time goes on...

...In the first, an earthship finds its way to a distant planet only to be turned away by superior intelligences because the human creature has failed to attain C3 consciousness, has not, this is to say, "become aware of its predicament, sought help, and received it...

...And though I am grateful that Percy does not sink to humorless prose to recreate once again Philip Rieff's psychological man or Christopher Lasch's narcissist, I am offended by his apparent decision to respond to this world rather more in the manner of Swift's disappointed Gulliver than as a witness to the love of God...

...Lost in the Cosmos presents his estimate of the modern experiment in science, individual freedom, and the "florid," fleshy quest for personal fulfillment...

...Percy is at his best when depicting varieties of folly, for example, when he recounts efforts to achieve the final dethronement of the "triadic creature" called man through unsuccessful conversations with chimpanzees and dolphins...

...Percy's seemingly unpalatable message is served up as an elegant, erudite, and often very funny satire on contemporary life that I suspect will titillate many modern Greeks (and perhaps a few Jews not offended by his condescending indulgence), even as it convicts them of a multitude of sins associated with the unrestrained self...

...Taken another way, Percy's dismissal of the human enterprise seems to me to be structured by a mean-spirited apprehen sion of his own religious norm...

...The social consequence of such self-defeating self-indulgence is an impending nuclear catastrophe, probably less than a century away...

...Percy thus permits his readers to join him in what he calls "transcending" others ("I understand you, but you can't understand me...

...Precisely...

...It is harder on the nerves...

...But the semiotic effort to define the hopeless creature "which is unique in its ability to understand the world but not itself" seems a trifle strained...

...But it should be conceded that his intended audience is a tougher one than that, say, of his soil brother, Jimmy Swaggart...

...The book will sell and the satire can be apprehended as a delicious conservative catharsis, an exercise in the author's - and reader's - superiority to the herd: to women, to the " 100,000,000 fundamentalist Christians" roaming the land, to nearly everyone...

...Consider the new law of the cosmos which he proposes:"If you're a big enough fool to climb a tree and like a cat refuse to come down, then someone who loves you has to make as big a fool of himself to rescue you...

...There may be plenty of "decent folk" left, he concedes, only to wonder "where...

...In the end," Percy concludes, diffidently proposing a Pasca-lian wager, it is the Judeo-Christian "remedy, it and no other, which is specified by the preposterous predicament of the human self as its sole remedy...

...Come back" to the narrow path, the path that only a few will be wise enough to pursue: this is the message in Percy's new bottle of prose...

...There are brief essays on every distressing side of this modern self - the bored self, the frightened self, the envious self, the impoverished self - leading to an extended semiotic essay on the self marooned in the cosmos...

...Percy is after the Greeks anyway, so Jewish readers may ride more or less free of charge...

...But if God is foolish enough to rescue someone as dispirited as Percy's satiric persona, why should He/She desert the rest of creation...

...Of twentieth century women, only Mother Teresa, Helen Keller, and Eudora Welty (an "intact" personality) escape his scorn...

...all the children molesters come from...

...For many readers, the vision of destruction (to borrow a formulation from Percy) may come as "not unrelievedly bad news," but rather only as "puta-tively bad news," even comforting in its way...

...Given this grim projection, a self-help book is the least Percy can bequeath us, even if it promises to be the last instance of a discredited genre...

...Peter Clecak A SOUTHERNER by birth, a Roman Catholic by choice, physician by training, Walker Percy probably will be remembered as an amateur belletrist...

...The retreat to the "spirit of the erotic" in the face of all this offers only momentary relief, and then quickly cheapens and trivializes sexual activity (which he takes to be rampant...

...This sets up the central rhetorical problem - and tension - of the book: the author must make the consequences of enlightenment, science, and narcissism, not to mention corruptions of his own religious tradition, seem more deadly and more preposterous than the largely discredited Christian story...

...This exercise in "signs" and "signifiers" strikes me as a clumsy recasting of a familiar if not altogether convincing point about our limited capacity for self-knowledge...

...Here is the only possible route of escape, or rather the only remaining mode of witnessing in the end times...

...He works alone in a room as bare as a Quaker meeting house with nothing between him and his art but a Scripto pencil, like God's finger touching Adam...

...Using the satirist's broad license, Percy dismisses all claims of his contemporaries...

...All other facets of the autonomous self having been explored and exhausted, we move on to the last diversion of this self: a nihilistic, violent consummation made possible by technological advances...

...In one sense, the faint Christian message can be cut along the perforated line and detached...

...And Percy takes us on a brief tour from the Fall from the semiotic Eden to the present moment - at the edge of wholesale violence - via a catalogue of boredom and disappointment: we are bored, he claims, with each other, with marriage, work, science, art, even consumption...