487 - Everynovelness and the Second Coming: Walter Percy's Fiction

Everynovelness and the Second Coming:
Walter Percy's Fiction
By Kent Gramm

Which is worse, to die with T. J. Jackson at Chancellorsville or live with Johnny Carson in Burbank?

(Lancelot, p. 158)

… We know now that the modern world is coming to an end … at the same time, the unbeliever will emerge from the fogs of secularism. He will cease to reap benefit from the values and forces developed by the very Revelation he denies… Loneliness in faith will be terrible. Love will disappear from the face of the public world, but the more precious will be that love which flows from one lonely person to another … the world to come will be filled with animosity and danger, but it will be a world open and clean.

(Romano Guardini, The End of the Modern World,
quoted by Walter Percy at the beginning of
The Last Gentleman)

Walker Percy has written a novel, perhaps two; some say five. It is-but perhaps they aren't-worth our time and attention.

I

Percy was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1916. He received an M.D. from Columbia in 1941, retired from medicine a year later due to tuberculosis, and published The Moviegoer in 1961. It won the National Book Award in 1962.

The young man in The Moviegoer undertakes a search which "anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life." A person sunk in everydayness (Heidegger's Alltaglichkeit) "might just as well be dead." The protagonist's voice mercilessly slices at the banality of beliefs, but admits that it is "impossible to rule God out." The search leads through the glittering flat ticky-tacky of the New South to a young lady as misfit as the hero, and ends without ending in uncertain co-existence with the American late '50s.

The search (along with the '50s) lives on in Percy's subsequent novels. In each we hear the same voice-whether in first person or not-and listen to the same concerns in augmenting repetition. In The Last Gentleman (1966) Will Barrett, a transplanted Southerner with propensities for deja vu, amnesia, and eavesdropping, conducts his

Kent Gramm is currently teaching at the University of Wisconsin at River Falls. He recently received his doctorate in English and creative writing from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and he holds degrees from Carroll College and Princeton Theological Seminary.

488 - Everynovelness and the Second Coming: Walter Percy's Fiction

search through a world he suspects of having already suffered the great cataclysm.

In Love in the Ruins, a pseudo-futuristic novel still more satiric than its predecessors, the cataclysm has happened, and the protagonist stalks a sniper alongside a weed-sprouting freeway, while inside a ruined motel three women wait for him. The Bantus lurk in the swamp, the sex clinic continues its imaginative experiments, the American Catholic Church operates from Cicero, Illinois, Tom More's Ontological Lapsometer might either save or destroy what remains of the world, and-as we expect in a Walker Percy novel-people "work hard all day, come home at five-thirty to their pretty homes, kiss their wives, toss their rosy babes in the air, light up their charcoal briquets or perhaps mount their tiny tractor mowers." Civilization suffers from "More's syndrome, or: chronic angelism-bestialism that rives soul from body," for "the world is broken, sundered, busted down the middle, self ripped from self and man pasted back together as mythical monster, half angel, half beast, but no man." As the novel ends, the hero turns, like Candide, to tending his garden.

Lancelot (1977) is told to a priest. Thus the novel is permeated by theology and sex. Lancelot Lamar has discovered that his daughter is not his, and this discovery ignites his quest for ultimacy. Its conclusion, withheld until the end but no secret to the reader, is apocalyptic. Lamar is for a time an anti-Lancelot after an unholy grail, but after his ordeal and madness he discovers that "there is no unholy grail just as there was no Holy Grail." He decides that either God exists or doesn't. And he will wait and give God time.

Percy, who has written a book on language (The Message in the Bottle), employs a style clear and merciless in its specificity, subtle in its humor, sly and variable in its descents to profundity; but the tone is familiar to those who have read contemporary intellectual fiction. Laconic, dry, frantic irony is not only contemporary but defensive: one who uses it can't be accused of being an unsophisticated sentimental assertive fool. But refuge has its price, and half-seriousness lacks the strange power of high seriousness. This style, seemingly so various and so new, rushes toward literal monotony.

Monotony might be complained of in Percy's fiction as a whole, through Lancelot. Each protagonist's predicament is described by the existentialists: our fallenness is "everydayness," and once we know we live in a wasteland it would be "bad faith" to keep playing our false roles. Contemplating escape through willed death awakens the possibility for us to re-enter the wasteland and live, to a degree, authentically. Some sort of relationship is essential to this authenticity.

Now there is nothing wrong with having a constant philosophical foundation for a group of novels. But in Percy, too many concomitant elements stick like burrs to his characters and situations. In The Second Coming, then, are we to expect not only the usual "everydayness" and thanatopsis, but also the usual crazy lady, the polyester New South, a

489 - Everynovelness and the Second Coming: Walter Percy's Fiction

Mercedes smelling of German leather, references to the Civil War and general concern with the past, guns and suicide, regional speech fragments, people rising up and telling others what to do, mythic women, freedom and love?

Yes.

And will we find storms at important moments, suicide, insanity, misfits, talk of apocalypse, search for ultimate hidden truth, postponed discovery used as a technique for achieving suspense?

Yes.

And we'll find the usual hanging ending, with the characters drifting somewhat more intelligently through everydayness?

No.

II

Walker Percy has used the old elements to make a new novel--or he has finished the old one. Percy himself has said he believes The Second Coming to be an advance, a resolution.

Will Barrett (The Last Gentleman) returns, middle-aged, in this novel. But he's a different Will. Except that be falls, one wouldn't know him from Adam.

He falls while playing golf. Then he remembers: his father was said to have fallen that day they went hunting and the shotgun discharged, wounding father and boy. But the middle-aged Will finally realizes that his father was trying to shoot him:

He was trying to warn me. He was trying to tell me that one day it would happen to me too, that I would come to the same place he came to, and I have…

His father eventually committed suicide, and Will now turns his gun silently in his bands. There is one last thought:

Ah, but what if there is another way? Maybe that was your mistake, that you didn't even look.

Is there a God or not? Can Will find out by consulting anyone? No.

… There are only two classes of people, the believers and the unbelievers. The only difficulty is deciding which is the more feckless.

… Take Christians. I am surrounded by Christians. They are generally speaking a pleasant and agreeable lot, not noticeably different from other people…A mystery: If the good news is true, why is not one pleased to hear it? And if the good news is true, why are its public proclaimers such assholes…

… As unacceptable as believers are, unbelievers are even worse.

… The present day unbeliever is crazy because he finds himself born into a world of endless wonders, having no notion how he got here, a world in which he eats, sleeps … works, grows old, gets sick, and dies, and… Not once in his entire life does it cross his mind to say to himself that his situation is preposterous…

… The more intelligent he is, the crazier he is… He is as insane as a French intellectual.

490 - Everynovelness and the Second Coming: Walter Percy's Fiction

In seeking a third alternative Will Barrett has gone "mad." He conceives a project: "My project is the first scientific experiment in history to settle once and for all the question of God's existence." The event which results is typical of an event bearing on faith: it can be thought of as no answer at all, or as a very clear answer.

The theology of The Second Coming is surprisingly traditional and profoundly simple: one transcends death and a fallen world through love. The symbolism is likewise traditional and simple: a dark cave and a greenhouse suggest death and life. In the cave, Will "had to turn his head sideways like a baby getting through a pelvis."

There is space only to mention the delight and meaning in the language of Allison, the girl in the greenhouse (fantasy though she might be). The incisiveness of Percy's paragraphs on Pentecostals, evangelists, and a jump-suited minister is fatal. The rebellious healthfulness of the nursing home section alone makes the book worth reading.

One might well read Walker Percy by reading only this novel, but read this excellent novel one must. The Second Coming might have ended in that nursing home, with Will Barrett feeling "a dazed content and a mild curiosity" had not Percy transcended everynovelness this time. But the book does not end there.