particular observation

Walker Percy reaches the summit of his art in this description of Sharon Kinkaid (who can be anywhere because "she is herself sweet life," one of those "village beauties of which the South is so prodigal ... commoner than sparrows and, like sparrows at home in the streets, in the parks, on the doorstep") sitting in a car and being herself:

By flexing her leg at a certain angle, she can stand the coke on a facet of her knee. What a structure it is, tendon and bone, facet and swell, and gold all over. (The Moviegoer)

What a structure, indeed. If only Myshkin could have made such an observation! If only Aglaya could have accompanied him for a drive in the South in the 1950s! (Not that Percy and his characters have all that much to teach Myshkin about how to make one's choices or observations appear.) But this sweet dynamism that no woman can ever wholly forgo while still possessed of tendon and bone, facet and swell is subject, for Binx Bolling, to the intervention of the phenomena of "malaise." The "mistral whistling" of desire for some such girl must contend with the "fog of uneasiness," the "thin gas of malaise," the motes of dust that "rise and fall in the sunlight" -- what Will Barrett in The Last Gentleman calls the "ravening" and "noxious" particles. These particles are the problematic data that Percy's main characters encounter on what one reviewer calls their "pilgrimages of observation."

Bolling first notices these motes during a research project:

I became extraordinarily affected by summer afternoons in the laboratory. The August sunlight came streaming in the great dusty fanlights and lay in yellow bars across the room. The old building ticked and creaked in the heat. Outside we could hear the cries of summer students playing touch football. In the course of an afternoon the yellow sunlight moved across old group pictures of the biology faculty. I became bewitched by the presence of the building; for minutes at a stretch I sat on the floor and watched the motes rise and fall in the sunlight. I called Harry's attention to the presence but he shrugged and went on with his work. He was absolutely unaffected by the singularities of time and place. His abode was anywhere. 

Though it is clear that though the particles are generally negative phenomena, it is not difficult to detect in Percy's work a certain fondness for them--or even a certain positive presence. Through the intervention of these particles, according to Barrett, people are "so deprived of their surface[s] as to be all but invisible to [each other]." But they are also phenomena of the enduring--of something that does not pass away in time.

In The Art of Fiction, Henry James writes:

What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character? What is a picture or a novel that is not of character? What else do we seek in it and find in it? It is an incident for a woman to stand up with her hand resting on a table and look out at you in a certain way; or if it be not an incident, I think it will be hard to say what it is. At the same time it is an expression of character.

Percy's major characters are denied a complete vision of the unity of character and incident. Incident as the endurance of character; character as the recognition of incident. Knowing, in other words. That unity comes and goes, subject to the whim of malaise (even with respect to the view of women who are capable of being, so to speak, all incident). "Everydayness" has compromised the data of physiognomy, the lingua franca of pilgrim observers (and of novelists and readers). Only bad environments, disasters, another character's occasional, almost accidental performance of an unthought characteristic gesture ("Mercer puts coal on the blazing kindling ... We might be back in Feliciana."), or the transfiguration effected by the presence of a movie star or Bolling's Aunt Emily lifts the fog. The actor William Holden's "heightened reality moves with him and all who fall within it feel it." Aunt Emily recognizes that the "only good things the South ever had" -- "a certain quality of spirit, a gaiety, a sense of duty, a nobility worn lightly, a sweetness, a gentleness with women" -- have lost out to the civilization of mediocrity. "There was such a time and there were such men," Bolling also knows, "men who could say to other men, here do this, and have it done and done with pleasure and remembered with pleasure." Those men are all dead. Their contemporaries, like Sam Yerger, are "only Cato on long Sunday afternoons and in the company of [Aunt Emily]." This same sort of in illo tempore analysis of character and incident occurs in Percy's genealogy of Barrett's family:

Over the years his family had turned ironical and lost its gift for action. It was an honorable and violent family, but eventually the violence had been deflected and turned inward. The great grandfather knew what was what and said so and acted accordingly and did not care what anyone thought. He even wore a pistol in a holster like a Western hero and once met the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in a barber shop and invited him then and there to shoot it out in the street. The next generation, the grandfather, seemed to know what was what but he was not really so sure. He was brave but he gave much thought to the business of being brave. He too would have shot it out with the grand Wizard if only he could have made certain it was the thing to do. The father was a brave man too and he said he didn't care what others thought but he did care. More than anything else, he wished to act with honor and to be thought well of by other men. So living for him became a strain. He became ironical. For him it was not a small thing to walk down the street on an ordinary September morning. In the end he was killed by his own irony and sadness and by the strain of living out an ordinary day in a perfect dance of honor. 

As for the present young man, the last of the line, he did not know what to think. So he became a watcher and a listener and a wanderer.

And this last young man testifies to that time by being able "to sit like Achilles," place Southern accents, and recognize those enduring motes that surrounded even Western heroes (or, for Bolling, movie stars)--and by being even more annoying than Charles Ryder when both a priest and death are in the room.

So why are these latter observations or the novels themselves not the summit of Percy's art? Because they are more like aphorisms? Because they almost demand footnotes to Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Warren, and Bernanos? Because no particle, no search could withstand the constant relevance of Eula Varner's knee? (If it is not some sort of blasphemy to suggest a similarity in Sharon's.) Is it his appreciators' pleasant insistence that "some piece of the Gospel is in there, but hidden inside romance, satire, horror, and drama, the way that a fat nightcrawler can conceal the sharp steel barb of the fishhook"? I don't know. But the romance isn't that romantic (someone said women don't get Percy), the horror isn't that horrifying (not like Anne Stanton and Willie Stark - that is horror), the dust isn't that dusty (unlike that observed by the Curé d'Ambricourt), etc.