Blogger: What's The Nail? The
Experience of the Self as Being and Naming It Outside Abstract Categories, i.e.
the Novels As Existential Narrative that Name (particularly “Love in the Ruins”
July 1st, #5; July 3d, #6).
Traveling
with Walker Percy |
Carl E. Olson |
Ignatius Insight
Editor's note (May 10, 2010): Walker Percy died of cancer
twenty years ago today, just eighteen days shy of his 74th birthday. This
article, originally written in 2004, is an introduction to life and thought of
one the finest Catholic writers of the past fifty years.
In the summer of 1995, my wife and I––both Evangelical
Protestants at the time–-took a trip with the Catholic novelist Walker Percy.
He had died in 1990, but his presence was very much evident in Signposts In A
Strange Land(Noonday Press, 1991, 1992), a posthumous collection of essays and
interviews we took along with us and read to one another as we drove from the
Pacific Northwest up into Canada
on a weeklong vacation.
The title was fitting––not because of the scenery along the
highways, but because at the time we found ourselves in a strange land between
the familiar, but frustrating, homeland of Evangelical Protestantism and the
largely unknown vistas of Catholicism. While others, including Pope John Paul
II, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Theresa of Avila ,
and G. K. Chesterton, would escort us into the Catholic Church a couple years
later, the melancholy and brilliant novelist from the Deep
South journeyed with us for an important stretch of that pilgrim’s
road.
More than a novelist, Walker Percy was a fellow wayfarer and
seeker, as well as a self-described "diagnostician" of the
"modern malaise" and a builder of signposts in a strange land.
Out of the Shadows of Southern Tragedy
Born in Georgia
in 1916, Walker Percy was shadowed by tragedy from the beginning of his life.
His paternal grandfather committed suicide with a shotgun in 1917. Percy’s
father, a highly intelligent and successful lawyer who was prone to deep
depression, killed himself in the same manner in 1929, just as Percy was
entering his teens. Percy later addressed his father’s suicide, at least
indirectly, in his second novel, The Last Gentleman(1966). Unbelievably, two
years after his father’s suicide, Percy’s mother drowned when her car ran off a
bridge not far from their home.
Walker and his brothers were taken in and adopted by their
enigmatic and well-educated "Uncle Will," their father’s cousin, and
a lawyer and author. Walker
loved Uncle Will dearly and gave him credit for changing his life. InPilgrim in
the Ruins, his biography of Percy, biographer Jay Tolson notes, "If it
hadn’t been for Uncle Will, Walker Percy once said, he probably would have
ended up a car dealer in Athens, Georgia." Uncle Will was a Southern
gentleman who held to a Stoic idealism and a Romantic view of the Old South.
Though deeply affected by Will’s beliefs, the shy and studious Walker soon
embraced a cynical agnosticism and the conviction that modern science held the
answers to man’s origins and future. Spurning the life of the lawyer –– a
profession highly esteemed in the Percy clan –– Walker chose to pursue a career in medicine.
After completing undergraduate work at the University
of North Carolina , he went on to Columbia to pursue
studies in pathology.
From Doubt to Faith to the "Diagnostic Novel"
An anonymous corpse carrying tuberculosis changed Percy’s
life forever. Attending medical school at Columbia ,
Percy contracted the disease while performing autopsies. Bedridden for three
years, he was exhausted and often depressed. Yet later in life he admitted that
despite the difficult ordeal he was secretly relieved at being able to leave
medicine behind. During his lengthy rehabilitation Percy spent much time reading
works of the existentialists Camus, Sartre, and Kierkegaard, as well as the
writings of Catholic thinkers Blaise Pascal, Romano Guardini, and St. Thomas
Aquinas. An insightful observer of human nature and relationships, Percy had
growing doubts about his scientific, materialist view of reality. Years later
he wrote,
"What did at last dawn on me as a medical student and
intern, a practitioner, I thought, of the scientific method, was that there was
a huge gap in the scientific view of the world. This sector of the world about
which science could not utter a single word was nothing less than this: what it
is like to be an individual living in the United States in the twentieth
century." ("Diagnosing The Modern Malaise," p. 213)
This realization led Percy to make three major decisions in
short order in his mid-thirties: to become a full-time writer, marry, and
become Catholic. Percy and Mary Bernice Townsend, (affectionately called
"Bunt"), were married in 1946, and entered the Catholic Church the
following year. Not long afterwards, they moved to the small town of Covington , Louisiana ,
where Percy wrote and lived until his death in 1990.
Initially, during the 1950s, Percy wrote technical articles
on semiotics – the study of language – for various scientific and theological
journals, as well as pieces about psychiatry, culture, and the South for Commonweal , America
Convinced that he needed a different literary vehicle for
taking his observations to a larger audience, Percy wrote two novels during the
1950s. Neither were published (Percy apparently burned one of the manuscripts),
but his third novel, The Moviegoer, was published in 1961.
Initially ignored and selling poorly, the novel was the
surprise winner of the National Book Award in 1962. Over the course of the next
three decades Percy wrote five more novels, published The Message in the
Bottle, wrote occasional articles, and produced the most unique and insightful
"self-help" book ever written, Lost In The Cosmos: The Last Self-Help
Book (1983). Each of these works, in their own way, grappled with entwining
anthropological concerns: the pervasive influence of scientism on modern man,
the resulting "modern malaise," man’s need and quest for life-giving
symbols and signs, and man as wayfarer and homo viator. Percy pursued these
issues with the belief that the modern novelist is meant to be a sort of
"diagnostician," probing and testing the human condition through his
literary craft.
The Cartesian Split
and the Failure of Scientism
Percy rightly dismissed the notion that people can live
without an anthropological vision, that is, a specific understanding of who man
is and what he meant for. "Everyone has an anthropology," he wrote in
the essay, "Rediscovering A Canticle For Leibowitz." "There is
no not having one. If a man says he does not, all he is saying is that his anthropology
is implicit, a set of assumptions which he has not thought to call into
question." His own conversion was due, in large part, to the realization
that scientism –– the belief that the scientific method and the technology it
produces can provide answers to man’s deepest questions and longings –– was
untenable and, in fact, was a lie. As a trained physician, Percy had respect
for science when properly practiced and understood. But he saw many theories
making claims to being "scientific," but in reality were ideological
positions based on a subjective and self-serving view of reality. In the essay
"Culture, The Church, And Evangelization," Percy wrote,
"The distinction which must be kept in mind is that
between science and what can only be called ‘scientism.’ . . . [Scientism] can
be considered only as an ideology, a kind of quasi-religion––not as a valid
method of investigating and theorizing which comprises science proper––a cast
of mind all the more pervasive for not being recognized as such and, accordingly,
one of the most potent forces which inform, almost automatically and
unconsciously, the minds of most denizens of modern industrial societies like
the United States." ("Culture, The Church, And Evangelization,"
p. 297).
Percy traced scientism back to Continental philosopher René
Descartes, believing the Cartesian distinction between the thinking mind and
the rest of the physical world had finally produced its evil fruit in the
twentieth century. This radical dualism shaped the ideologies of Communism and Nazism,
the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and secular humanism. Each of these belief
systems, however well or poorly articulated, rejected God and set up man as the
ultimate reference point for all of human activity, whether that activity was
political, social, or sexual. Now freed from the confines of the supernatural
order and objective truth, man could create and customize his own reality:
totalitarian, egalitarian, hedonistic, or consumer-oriented.
Percy often noted the paradoxical fact that man can form a
perfect scientific theory explaining the material world –- but cannot
adequately account for himself in that theory. Man is the round peg never quite
fitting into the square hole of scientism. "Our view of the world, which
we get consciously or unconsciously from modern science, is radically
incoherent," Percy wrote in his essay "The Fateful Rift: The San
Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind." Again, science must either recognize
its own limits or create confusion: "A corollary of this proposition is
that modern science is itself radically incoherent, not when it seeks to
understand things and subhuman organisms and the cosmos itself, but when it
seeks to understand man, not man’s physiology or neurology or his bloodstream,
but man qua man, man when he is peculiarly human. In short, the sciences of man
are incoherent." ("The Fateful Rift: The San
Andreas Fault In The Modern Mind," p. 271). In a
self-interview, "Questions They Never Asked Me," he put the matter
more bluntly:
"This life is much too much trouble, far too strange,
to arrive at the end of it and then be asked what you make of it and have to
answer, ‘Scientific humanism.’ That won’t do. A poor show. Life is a mystery,
love is a delight. Therefore, I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for
nothing less than the infinite mystery and infinite delight; i.e., God."
("Questions They Never Asked Me," p. 417)
The Modern Malaise
In each of Percy’s novels the main character realizes that
something is seriously wrong, but cannot identify the source of the anxiety.
These characters suffer from the "modern malaise," an unknown but
palpable dis-ease –– a sense of despair not easily brought into focus and
identified. The epigraph at the start of The Moviegoer quotes from Kierkegaard’s
The Sickness Unto Death: "…the specific character of despair is
specifically this: it is unaware of being despair." In The Moviegoer, the
young movie-going Binx Bolling states that "the malaise is the pain of
loss. The world is lost to you, the world and the people in it, and there
remains only you and the world and you no more able to be in the world than
Banquo’s ghost." A successful stockbroker, Binx is unsettled by his own
gnawing emptiness and is finally compelled to seek out the solution. When considering
whether or not God exists, Binx reflects that, "as everyone knows, the
polls report that 98% of Americans believe in God and the remaining 2% are
atheists and agnostics — which leaves not a single percentage point for a
seeker. . . . Have 98% of Americans already found what I seek or are they so
sunk in everydayness that not even the possibility of a search has occurred to
them?"
This malaise, Percy makes clear, is not simply the
corruption and abandonment of Judeo-Christian morality. Immorality is a symptom,
"not a primary phenomenon, but rather an ontological impoverishment"
("Diagnosing The Modern Malaise," p. 214). The real issue is more
basic: What is man and who am I as a specific man? The average person is led by
the dominant culture to believe that everything is fine and life is set –– a
comfortable existence is for the taking. "But something is wrong,"
Percy notes. "He has settled everything except what it is to live as an
individual. He still has to get through an ordinary Wednesday afternoon. . . .
What does this man do with the rest of the day? the rest of his life?"
("Diagnosing The Modern Malaise," p. 213).
This is the predicament of Dr. Tom More, first introduced in
Love in the Ruins(1971), and reappearing in The Thanatos Syndrome (1987). A self-described
"bad Catholic" and a psychiatrist, More is a widower falling apart at
the seams, filled with terror, anxiety, and lust. He confesses that he is
"possessed by terror and desire and live a solitary life. My life is a
longing, longing for women, for the Nobel prize, for the hot bosky bite of
bourbon whisky and other great heart-wrenching longings that have no
name." As potential catastrophe threatens to overwhelm him, More must come
to grips with the "malaise" infecting "the Christ-forgetting
Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world." Similar challenges confront
the characters in Percy’s other novels. While the "malaise" which
Percy describes is distinctly modern, it is inherently ancient in nature; it is
the longing of man for meaning in a world that has abandoned any real notion of
transcendent truth.
Man as Wayfarer and Homo viator
Although influenced by the work of Sartre and Camus, Percy’s
"existentialism" is not a despairing, atheistic sort, but a hopeful,
theistic sort. This can easily be missed due to the darkness that often fills
the pages of his novels. An example of this is Lancelot (1977), Percy’s most
raw portrayal of man’s decadence and loss of self. A read could easily
misunderstand the book, for it turns on one single word, uttered at the very
end. That word is the difference between Lancelot being nihilisitic and being
theistic. Man’s existential crisis –– his confusion and despair over his own
existence –– can only be satisfactorily addressed by Catholicism and its
incarnational, sacramental vision. In "The Holiness of the Ordinary,"
Percy writes,
"What distinguishes Judeo-Christianity in general from
other world religions is its emphasis on the value of the individual person,
its view of man as a creature in trouble, seeking to get out of it, and
accordingly on the move. Add to this anthropology the special marks of the
Catholic Church: the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, which, whatever they
do, confer the highest significance upon the ordinary things of this world,
bread, wine, water, touch, breath, words, talking, listening––and what do you
have? You have a man in a predicament and on the move in a real world of real
things, a world which is a sacrament and a mystery; a pilgrim whose life is a
searching and a finding. Such a view of man as wayfarer is, I submit, nothing
else than a recipe for the best novel-writing from Dante to Dostoevsky."
("The Holiness of the Ordinary," p. 369)
Percy explained that his anthropology is
"scriptural" and embraces "Gabriel Marcel’s Homo viator."
("An Interview with Zolta´n Aba´di-nagy," p. 375). Man’s search is
for himself and for the Other. In the end, finding one means finding the other,
for we cannot see our humanity rightly unless we see ourselves in relation to
the Creator. In several of Percy’s novels, the main character begins to see
himself more clearly at he embraces unexpected love. This human love eventually
points him beyond himself to the ultimate source of sacrificial love. Percy’s
depictions of these moments of recognition and transition are masterful, always
understated, quietly observing the ordinary nature and commonness surrounding
such significant (and sign-filled) events.
The Diagnostic Novel
While many novelists are content to be literary
dermatologists, Percy was a literary surgeon – or, better yet, a literary
coroner –– cutting beneath the skin and examining the very blood and guts of
the modern man:
"To the degree that a society has been overtaken by a
sense of malaise rather than exuberance, by fragmentation rather than
wholeness, the vocation of the artist, whether novelist, poet, playwright,
filmmaker, can perhaps be said to come that much closer to that of the
diagnostician rather than the artist’s celebration of life in a triumphant age.
Something is indeed wrong, and one of the tasks of the serious novelist is, if
not to isolate the bacullus under the microscope, at least to give the sickness
a name, to render the unspeakable speakable. Not to overwork the comparison,
the artist’s work in such times is assuredly not that of the pathologist whose
subject matter is a corpse and whose question is not ‘What is wrong?’ but ‘What
did the patient die of?" For I take it as going without saying that the
entire enterprise of literature is like that of a physician undertaken in hope.
Otherwise, why would be here? Why bother to read, write, teach, study, if the
patient is already dead?––for, in this case, the patient is the culture
itself." ("Diagnosing The Modern Malaise," p. 206).
In describing his novels as "diagnostic," Percy
turned to Aquinas and drew a careful distinction between art and morality. He
once explained that "art is making; morality is doing…. This is not to say
that art, fiction, is not moral in the most radical sense — if it is made
right. But if you write a novel with the goal of trying to make somebody do
right, you’re writing a tract — which may be an admirable enterprise, but it is
not literature." He goes on to say that what interests him as a novelist
is the "looniness" of modern man, "the normal denizen of the
Western world who, I think it is fair to say, doesn’t know who he is, what he
believes, or what he is doing. This unprecedented state of affairs is, I
suggest, the domain of the ‘diagnostic’ novelist."
Here lies, I think, the greatness of Percy’s writing.
Although a brilliant stylist, he provides far more than a mere description of
the epidermis, but cuts into the sinew and fiber of the human soul. Once there,
he honestly names the disease and confusion he sees, and also indicates that a
cure does exist. He works in a world of curious messages, sorting through
ciphers and codes, plunging the depths of human language in search of further
clues. "The contemporary novelist, in other words, must be an
epistemologist of sorts," Percy explains, "He must know how to send
messages and decipher them. The messages may come not in bottles but rather in
the halting and muted dialogue between strangers, between lovers and
friends." ("Diagnosing The Modern Malaise," p. 217).
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