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A Brief and Hardly Adequate Synopsis of Walker Percy and his Work
For Percy's philosophical roots, see also:
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From the Percy Internet Project:
"How does Percy speak to us? Perhaps it is because of his ever-vigilant insight into the widespread ambiguity and inconsistency of the modern scientific era. Indeed, his peculiar knack for being able to speak to the individual in an age of "abstraction" is all the more poignant when we consider how artfully he expresses himself through his chosen medium of fiction.
On a philosophical/moral level, Percy might readily be compared to Kierkegaard the Danish existentialist or the important American moralist Ralph Waldo Emerson; on a scientific level, he might be compared with Copernicus or perhaps Freud for his revolutionary perspective on the human place in the cosmos relative to his language theory; while on an artistic level, he might equally compare well with Dostoyevsky or T.S. Eliot for the sensitivity of his vision and the poetic way in which he creates his fiction.
All combined, Percy reveals himself a kind of "post-modern" Da Vinci, but using the American South as his canvas and drawing board rather than Renaissance Italy. Sketching human drama, faithful to the tragic and comedic alike, with the best of human thought and art behind it..."
Walker Percy was a physician with a great respect for
psychiatry and an existentialist
with a fascination for the study of the human condition, specifically, human nature and character. From the Preface to Lost in the Cosmos, by Walker Percy:
"The Strange Case of the Self, your self, the Ghost which Haunts the Cosmos...Why it is that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos--novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes--you are beyond doubt the strangest?"
As a result,
his characters and characterization are central to his novels and to understanding his themes; his
plots were secondary vehicles for conveying characterization in Percy's art. An examination of
Percy's characters and characterizations is key to understanding his message.
His protagonists were concerned with the question:
"Who am I, and why am I here?"
(Will Barrett asks this question in Percy's second novel, The Last Gentleman.)
In other words, what is the meaning of life, the purpose for living? Some things that his
characters discover the purpose for living is NOT:
Social conformity or approbation in any form:
Social approval or group acceptance
Social status or class
Material success: making money
Career success
Fame, fortune or stardom
Scientific progress, advancement of knowledge
Appreciation or creation of art, music, literature
Entertainment
Athletic prowess, such as, a good golf game, football-hero-status, running a marathon
Physical health
Physical comfort, pleasure or escape, such as:
Sex
Food
Alcohol or drugs
Religious belief
Traditional religion, ritual
Feel-good religion: born-again Christianity, Pentacostals
Religious unbelief: atheism
Charitable good works: helping others
Creating or living in the Perfect Society
Country or society
Home and family
Friends
Psychological health
Self actualization
Enjoying nature, the "wonders of the universe"
For Percy, the above are meaningless reasons to continue our existence. A hard and
fast existentialist would point us to the most prominent explanation for this stance:
We're all going to die anyway. The one inevitable, inescapable truth of life is that
we will die eventually. What we do on this earth until our only certain and inevitable
fate (death) catches up with us is only, and merely,
a temporary distraction, an arbitrary social construction we've adopted as our purpose,
that we're temporarily deluded has lasting import and meaning, but does not...
since everything we do will end with our death.
You may be thinking: "What's left?" What's left after you take away the above reasons for living? Good question, and you're onto something, because the answer is: Not much. In fact, the above illusions as reasons for living give us a framework for acting, enable us to act. Take them away, as happens often to Percy's protagonists, and you are left with TIME: empty time to fill up until your death, and no idea what to do with it.
Percy's characters often wander aimlessly as a result, or exhibit apathy or strange detachment to the events that do occur -- whether daily rituals or chance occurrences. All of Percy's progagonists are once-removed from their experiences, often gazing with curious detachment at the events that occur to them, as though they are standing outside themselves. They are, to a greater or lesser degree, "out of touch" with the "real" world, which Percy sometimes literally draws as amnesia or "fugue states" bedeviling his protagonists.
Sometimes these wanderers have a quest, often a quirky or odd quest, sometimes they do not, and instead, wander about directionless. Of those that have a quest, Lancelot was on the quest for the "unholy grail," and Will Barrett in The Second Coming quests for a sign of God's existence.
While they may seem lost to the rest of the world, and to themselves, for Percy, they are closer to the truth, meaning, and purpose of life than those who march determinedly through the world, quite certain of their next step, their goals, and their desires. Because in the midst of this void of meaning, on the other side of this chasm of emptiness, is real and lasting purpose and meaning. Percy's protagonists exist in the midst of Kierkegaard's "Leap of Faith," suspended over the chasm, having abandoned one side of the cliff, the physical world and all that is in it, and having not yet reached the other side. Percy's characters exhibit various stages of spiritual development so that while they may seem lost, in reality they are really "onto something" and closer to truth, or a ultimate and lasting answer (as Percy sees it), than the rest of their world.
The Percy Study
Reading
Allusions abound in Percy's works. During his years-long convalescence from a nearly fatal illness, Percy read voraciously.
In any of Percy's novels, in the space of just one page, you can sometimes find two or three different allusions to other authors.
Just a few of the works he draws from are: Yeats' "Second Coming," the poetry of Gerard Manly
Hopkins, Pascal, the French existentialists, especially Gabriel Marcel, Huxley's Brave New World, Ralph Ellison's
Invisible Man, Dante, Arthurian legend, Flannery O'Connor, Updike's Rabbit series. Percy also was thoroughly well-read in theology, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, and could dialogue easily with anyone in these fields, as seen in his collection of essays, The Message in the Bottle, on language and what it reveals about the nature of man.
Other Themes
The Mind-Body Problem was an important theme for Percy. The issue of "physical reductionism" dominated Percy's thoughts, themes, and characters. Understood
broadly, this is the reduction (and explanation) of all that is spiritual to the physical realm.
Narrowly, it is the reduction of the "soft sciences" to the "hard sciences" -- ultimately
reducing everything to the "hardest" science of all, physics.
Scientific reductionism reduces psychology to biology, biology to chemistry and physics, so that all can
be explained, even emotions and soul-events, in terms of a physico-chemical interaction in our brain.
(Depression is just C-fibers firing in your brain, nothing more. Take some Prozac.) Human
existential or spiritual malaise can be understood, explained, and corrected through
a modification of environment, biology, and genes. There's a pill for every ailment.
For Percy, this doesn't solve the real problem.
However, Cartesian dualism offers no better explanation for man's predicament. This is a three hundred year old problem René Descartes started, of how a mind, which is, as Descartes claimed, of an entirely different and separate substance as a body, can exist in a body and yet relate to or "communicate with" the body. In this view, human beings are a "ghost in a machine." This theory is called Cartesian dualism and it rose to ascendancy in the 1700's and has reigned ever since. Percy once claimed that if he had lived long enough, he would have been able to "get Descartes' bacon."
For Percy, who is a "monist," the answer to the mind-body problem is in the human capacity to symbolize. Percy wrote much on language theory, and was fascinated with language, which he considered "symbol-mongering," a uniquely human
capacity that set us apart from the animals. He was heavily influenced by Charles Sanders Peirce, and
he had a triadic and tetradic theory of language. Also, the meaning of words, and their too great familiarity that arises from their overuse that renders them meaningless, is a prevalent topic in both Percy's fiction and non-fiction. Religious language, the language of the church, has become ineffectual and unable to do its job
any more. Communication through silence and the effect of silence on humans were also themes in Percy's fiction.
Percy considers in all his works, the immanent-transcendent split in the human personality. Some of us are "romantics," or beset with "angelism" as he called it in Love in the Ruins. The abstract, art, ideals, the "beautiful," the intellect, and the transcendent drive this sort of person, who is immobilized by his transcendence to a greater or lesser degree. Others of us are "salesmen"...beset with "bestialism." Down-to-earth, practical, this-worldly, physically oriented, concerned with survival and making money, this sort of person, these upright citizens, fully socially adjusted, are missing a certain self and life awareness -- binding them to the physical world only.
One of Percy's themes was "knowing what you want to do" and what you want others to do, and the effect that has on others. (Usually, they'll just do what you say, so impressed are they that someone knows what he wants.) Closely aligned with this is a feeling of immobilization some of his characters experience, and the reverse side of the same coin, the realization of the "freedom to act" once the character has shirked off all socially given expectations for behavior and being.
Incarceration and institutionalization -- whether in prison or a mental hospital -- is a common motif in Percy's fiction. Percy himself was a patient in a medical hospital for two years after medical school -- he contracted tuberculosis during his residency, and so was familiar with what it was like to be somewhat anonymous in one room, one cell, for an extended period of time. The use of institutions, and institutionalization, in his work enabled Percy to demonstrate that institutionalization, when the individual becomes subsumed by the needs and agenda of the community, is insidious.
My dissertation, "Walker Percy's Genesis Phenomenon: Towards a Radical Anthropology and a Coherent Cosmology," encompasses many of the ideas above.
Buy Percy's books on-line through
The Walker Percy Project bookstore
For Percy's philosophical roots, see also:
|
For more information on Percy, go to the |
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