Over at ISI’s blog, Jennifer Hooten ranks Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer as #3 on her Five Books Every American Should Read list. Her summary of the novel runs through themes discussed at this blog e.g. homelessness, social selves.
Like The Moviegoer, Percy’s Love in the Ruins has the hero undergo a similar character development. Both novels also have secondary characters which are human signposts (Binx’s brother, More’s daughter) for the main characters. These human signposts or saints are absent in the later novels. Is Percy getting darker or is this a development of his ‘Indirect Communication’? He writes: “My theory (like Flannery’s) is that the times are such that the language of religion is so exhausted, de trop, that the tactic of the apologist must be indirect, perhaps even devious. More devious even than S[oren] K[ierkegaard]”
Percy and O’Connnor’s method has certainly made them amenable to Sophisticated or Secular Americans today, but it also makes them vulnerable to misinterpretation as well. Flannery O’Connor had to write a Note to the 2nd edition of Wise Blood in order to clarify its meaning. Their fictional worlds are strange lands so without a point in the right direction, the reader is likely to get lost.
July 11th, 2011 | 12:21 am
My favorite of the Percy novels is the loopy Love in the Ruins. Something about the idea of late-60s-style societal break-down being fought out on golf courses appeals to my suburban soul. The Moviegoer has plenty of priceless moments, but I find it hard to get fully on board with Binx’s angst/alienation. The later companion to Love in the Ruins, The Thanatos Syndrome, is perhaps the one to start with, because it really works as a mystery thriller, and it seems to be all that’s great in Percy but in presented in a more subtle way. Ideas that seem a bit extremist or zany in the other novels come across in it as fully plausible. Of course, that makes some of them creepier.
Haven’t read Lancelot or The Second Coming.
July 11th, 2011 | 6:44 am
Bob Dylan has a line, “..no direction home,” that may be an element in Ms. Flannery’s work. I just happen to be re-reading “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (and I’m looking but can’t remember where I placed the darn book!), and while I’ve always thought that Flannery was critiquing modernity, your blog comments are directing me toward a more differentiated analysis, namely that she was concerned with portraying the individual/personal corruption and the collapse of man’s necessary apperceptive abilities while living in a condition/state of sin. In choosing to ‘sin’ Flannery shows us that anything (grotesqueries) is possible/justified including murder, torture, rape, ….as long as the self is sated!
Jason, great post!
July 11th, 2011 | 7:54 am
Great topic, of course. The exhaustion of language is a great opportunity for the novelist.
Percy wasn’t a “decline and fall man” and my opinion he becomes less dark. LANCELOT I’m told is a very Voegelian book, and it’s certainly anti-gnostic. THE THANATOS SYNDROME is anti-romantic, among other things. LOVE IN THE RUINS should be read with the last part of the sci-fi ending of LOST IN THE COMOS about the reality of love in the ruins and the end of pop Cartesian loneliness…
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