I’ve had conversations that touch on this with a friend who was, in fact, the very first reader of Walker Percy I ever met and who remains fascinated and influenced by his work. The question that’s been raised several times (and left unanswered) is whether it was good or bad that (in his take) as Percy’s career progressed his views on mankind and the (post)modern world were articulated more and more clearly — but at the expense of the prose and the quality of the works as novels. Anyone who has read The Thanatos Syndrom should be able to agree that its primary purpose is not to serve as art per se. (Indeed, if you arm yourself with a copy of Love in the Ruins and the fourth chapter of Lawler’s Postmodernism Rightly Understood, the only two aesthetic reasons to read TS are the “Confession” toward the middle and the fact that Tom More may very well never have changed out of the dirty seersucker he’s first seen wearing by the of the novel.)You couldn't really put the problem with Walker Percy any better than this. Speaking with Dr. Fahey, I made the mistake of calling this "a kind of frankness," but it's really the fact that even Love in the Ruins has only one or two parts that are actually like a novel. And there is nothing about its ending (other than a priest's "scalding" comment that More should probably just shut up) that justifies its inclusion in a reading list for Postmodern Conservatives--but I haven't read Lawler's chapter, so maybe it's part of the point that Dr. More's diagnostic ability does not prevent his "failure." For that matter, there's nothing in the whole extent of Lancelot that couldn't have been written better in one paragraph by Robert Penn Warren (some of whose books seem pretty strangely unfinished too). Here's a quote from one of his essays (the one on Chekhov):
Most contemporary novelists have moved on into a world of rootless and isolated consciousness for whom not even the memory and the nostalgia exist. As Lewis Simpson put it: 'The covenant with memory and history has been abrogated in favor of the existential self.'By way of a re-articulation of the role of the novelist as diagnostician, Percy gestures towards art--especially to that art which is practiced by the novelist--as a kind of "cognitive explanatory" power that must, by appropriating the "curious misapprehension of science" that governs the pathology of Western man, find a way to "function" in the epistemological gaps that belong to this new era that "does not even know its own name." But where, within his own work, is the poetic response to this diagnostic effort?
Percy's art transcribes as ellipsis what he (probably rightly) calls the "epistemological gaps" created (his word) by modern science and poorly understood existentialism. He asks, "what happens when we realize that universal agreement with and praise of Huxley and Orwell is not enough?" and then articulates a "pursuit of happiness" that is neither relevant nor compelling without his subsequent essays (if then). Diagnosis and therapy are neither myth nor poetry.
In other words, Percy is an essayist who writes novels so that you will first read the novels, then his essays, and finally his novels as essays.
P.S. I should probably say that he doesn't actually ask the Huxley/Orwell question, though he does mention them. From a post from a while ago: "[Y]et Percy himself sought to distinguish his novel from books like 1984 and Brave New World when in “Concerning Love in the Ruins” he wrote, “Orwell and Huxley were writing political satire…what I was concerned with in this novel is something else altogether...the novel is only incidentally about politics.'"
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Ayn Rand is also an "essayist who writes novels so that you will first read the novels, then [her] essays, and finally [her] novels as essays."
"In other words, Percy is an essayist who writes novels so that you will first read the novels, then his essays, and finally his novels as essays."
The way that I almost phrased it in my post is that Percy's novels are novels in the same way that Plato's dialogues are drama. I don't know quite how much he intended them to be that "poetic response" you bring up (perhaps The Moviegoer, though that's one I need to return to before talking too much about it). I tend to think that Percy wrote novels rather than book-length essays (an in addition to his non-fiction) because the form lends itself to the kind of diagnostic function he was trying to demonstrate ... there is a way in which Percy the author was always more a doctor than an artist.
Three Ravens,
I have never read Rand. At Post Right, Jordan Smith gives a briefer, more severe critique of Rand than Wall of Percy, but both judgments are similarly focused on the way that topical (probably the wrong word) clarity and relevance can overtake "art." Of course, that critique need not include a rejection of the political or prophetic value of either author.
I would contrast both (if only by hearsay) with All the King's Men.
JL,
"Percy the author was always more a doctor than an artist."
I think that is right. Which leaves the question of whether the diagnostic style is an adequate expression of the form of the novel (I don't think so). He correctly diagnoses the "elevation of the scientific method"--exactly the sort of thing for which literature (art) and liturgy should be prescribed--but seems to go no further than the talking cure.
I don't quite catch your meaning with regard to Plato. It seems to me that what Percy offers, at least in Love in the Ruins, is better captured in his essays/lectures than through his novels. I couldn't say that I recall any one part of its drama as being necessary for the meaning or "poetry" of that which it claims to diagnose; with Plato, on the other hand, one gets the impression--via commentators like Bloom, Gonzalez, and Ranasinghe--of the inexhaustibility of the dramatic and allusive elements of the dialogues (though it probably wouldn't make a good play, maybe that is what you were referring to) as "poetic responses" to their propositional/logical aporias. Plato demands the attention of your imagination.
Dr. Percy's writing is to Aynnie Rand as like Nietzsche is to punk rock.
They are novels--even Love in the Ruins has a narrative, along with the satirical commentary. One doesn't necessarily have to imbibe La Misa to understand what he was getting at (and WP's writing not as right-wing as some lit-types spin it). Really, post 9-11 America still resembles a Percyian dystopia (or say Katrina).
J, in what way does Love in the Ruins resemble post-9/11 America? It feels pretty contrived and irrelevant to me.
It's hyperbolic to say it isn't a novel, I guess, but I'll stick with Wall's last comment that "Percy the author was always more a doctor than an artist."
It has been some time since my last perusal of LitR, but I recall the battles on the golf course, a concern with terrorism, racial issues, not to say the intellectual battles between behaviorists and the pious (and some slightly sexy Updike aspects). That all seems 9-11ish a bit--though the attack on WTC even outdoes Percyian nightmares.
I have read Dr. Percy was attempting a sort of Orwellian sort of dystopia satire--with a catholic spin. He succeeded in creating a certain Orwellian vibe, though perhaps his writing's a bit too regional or something, and not lacking that, je ne sais quoi, southern noir that many WASPs don't quite get (Percy probably preferred Faulkner rather than Orwell, or sci-fi, or Pynchonian sorts). Percy manages to be entertaining and scary at the same time (and again, I don't think we have to attend La Misa brunch to appreciate his writing. The Moviegoer also quite entertaining, tho' perhaps a bit "existential" now).
I don't know if you've seen this already: "From the Faith of America comes the Weigelian Church, which preaches liberal capitalism, pre-emptive war, the Little Way of Sarah Palin, global democratic revolution, and faith and works. Walker Percy saw this Church coming in Love in the Ruins. He called it the American Catholic Church. One of its major feast days was Property Rights Sunday, during which the ACC would display a blue banner showing Christ holding the American home (with white picket fence) in His hands."
Percy mentions somewhere in either a speech or essay that he was not attempting political satire of the Orwellian kind, but it's probably safe to say that's how most people remember him--and I don't know that it's altogether wrong.
Percy doesn't feel a whole heck of a lot like Faulkner to me. There doesn't seem to be any real knowing happening. More like nonKing's Men Robert Penn Warren some of the time, but I'm not really good at that kind of comparison. I haven't read any Updike. Then again, I'm basing most of this off just Love in the Ruins. As I recall, The Last Gentleman didn't bother me as much.
Yes LitR pokes fun at bogus catholics--property rights sunday!-- fundamentalists, and marxist-leftist windbags as well. Maybe Faulkner (or Orwell) was not the right comparison--Dostoyevsky (with some scientific expertise). Though he was still a bit of satirist. That said, he saw something in the academic scientific establishment that really bothered him (whether behaviorist, stalinist, or zionist, I am not sure).
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