The Second Coming contains the best of Walker Percy's fiction concerning how to fix the problem O'Connor diagnoses, the problme of the contemporary era, the problem that confronts us when our system of language and symbols is meaning-starved. Percy's novel opens with the malaise O'Connor defines; the story gives us the tools to solve it. His characters, Will Barrett and Allison Huger, search for ways to make their love and marriage mean something in this world which is devoid of meaning. Will and Allie's relationship is an "emblem for how one may yet turn back the tide of violence, apathy, and boredom... and turn the massive potential for apocalypse - personal, national, and global - toward the equal potential for love" (Hobson 131). The novel takes up the quest for meaning where O'Connor left off.
The Second Coming is Will Barrett's story. Will despairs over the state of the world, a world in which people feel bad when they should feel good and good when they should feel bad. He is a successful, though retired, lawyer who inherited a fortune from his wife and who spends his time playing golf with his friends and doing good works for the needy. Yet Will has discovered that good works and keeping busy will not save his soul or make him happy. When he obseerves the people around him who seem to be happy, he finds that he does not want their kind of happiness. Will, like The Misfit, wants to part of the hypocrisy of the Christianity offered to him by Jack Curl and Leslie. Jack Curl is a chaplain who is "uneasy" talking about religion (Second 160). Will questions Jack about faith and Jack evades the questions using sweeping gneralizations like, "Grace is a mysterious thing" (160) and "Do you know where I've found God, Will?... In other people" (159). He avoids Will's questions about the Jews and God, talking instead about his forthcoming retreat during which "Protestants, Catholics, Anglicans, unbelievers, Jews - all wonderful guys" spend the weekend fishing and shooting the breeze. Will's daughter, Leslie, offers Will a different kind of faith experience. She is a born-again Christian and has had a personal encounter with Jesus Christ. Will chooses neither form of religion, but decides to pose the question about God's existence directly to God.
Will is "a successful retired lawyer but [is] still unsuccessful in making sense out of his existence and still haunted by buzzing memories from his distant Mississippi childhood" (Tolson 91). During the first half of the novel, Will journeys through his own dark night of the soul. He is suffering from mental illness which causes him to wander about in a trance-like state. The novel opens with Will being shot at on a sunny afternoon. He contemplates suicide, and realizes as he holds his Luger, "I know why it is better to be shot at on a Sunday afternoon than not to be shot at. Because it means maybe there is an enemy after all" (Second 23-24). Will feels bad for no apparent reason, and thinks that someone shooting at him would make sense of his despair. He does not understand the world he inhabits, a world he sees as essentially dead. He is surrounded, literally, by friends and family, is wealthy beyond imagining, and is living "in the most Christian nation in the world, the U.S.A., in the most Christian part of that nation, the South, in the most Christian state in the South, North Carolina, in the most Christian town in North Carolina" (14-15), yet he is not happy.
As will wanders around the golf course, his home, and the retirement center he owns, he gradually remembers and comes to terms with the long-ignored reason he is now deaf in one ear: his father tried to kill him when they were in the field hunting. His father shot Will's ear. Later, Will's father committed suicide and Will witnessed it. His father's death left Will with no means of creating order in his own life, so he spends the next forty-odd years searching for order and failing to find it in conventional Christianity. Then Will meets Allie.
Will's father, though dead, is an important voice in the novel: "It speaks for all those who are obsessed by the death wish in this violent century, a wish symbolized in the novel by the death's head of the German World War II insignia, under which six million deaths were rationalized as the 'final solution' (Hobson 110-111). Will's father was obsessed by death, both the death-in-life he was living and literal death. When Will remembers the incident which has haunted him all his life, he wonders why his father, an expert marksman, shot only Will's ear:
Let me get is straight now.Will's father knew that life in the twentieth century was really death - O'Connor and Percy would say that life-as-death exists because our most important words are dead. Will's father chose literal death over the horrible death-in-life he thought he was living because there is both dignity and truth in literal death. Will's father wanted to save Will from the life which is death.
You shot the first single.
Then you broke the breech, ejected the two, and reloaded, but with one shell.
One shell for the single, two for me, one for you.
Then how did you nearly miss me?
You couldn't miss a quail on the wing with one barrel at fifty feet. Yet you nearly missed with both barrels at fifteen feet.
What happened at the very laast second that you pulled up?
Was it love or failure of love?
And how did you miss yourself?
Well, whatever the reason, you corrected it the next time, didn't you? In the attic, in Mississippi. But why didn't you take me with you then, if you knew something and were sure that you knew it?
The sorrow in your eyes when I came and sat beside you in Georgia - were you sorry you did it or sorry you didn't?
He was smiling down at the shotgun and shaking his head.
Sorry you didn't do it. Because the next time you took no chances and did it right, used both barrels, both thumbs, and your mouth. (Second 171-172)
Yet Will is living the life his father wanted to avoid and the life his father tried to help him avoid. When Will finally remembers the shootings, he thinks he understands why his father chose literal death. His father was a member of the living dead and he did not want Will to suffer the same fater. Will's father had seen only literal death as the cure for the death-in-life he was living, and Will vows to find another answer. He wonders why the decision to seek another answer makes him feel so good:
Why did he feel so good? Was it because for the first time in his life he could suddenly see what had happened to his father, exactly where he was right and where he was wrong? Right: you said I will not put up with a life which is not life or death. I don't have to and I won't. Right, old mole, and if you were here in rich reborn Christian Carolina with its condos and 450 SELs and old folks rolling pills and cackling at Hee Haw, you wouldn't put up with that either.Will thinks he knows that literal death is not the answer. "It dawned on him that his father's suicide was wasted. It availed nothing, proved nothing, solved nothing, posed no questions let alone answered questions, did nobody good. It was no more than an exit, a getting up and a going out, a closing of a door" (211). Will searches for a new answer in the life-in-life that can be revived by rediscovering the language and symbols of Christianity through loving both Allie and God.
Ah, but what if there is another way? Maybe that was your mistake, that you didn't even look. That's the difference between us. I'm going to find out once and for all. You never even looked. (153)
Had Will been less busy with his remembering of his father, he might have recognized God's grace leading him to Allie when he first slices out of bounds during the golf game:
Just as he hits the low point in his life - he has won many honors and is wealthy, but also is secretly desperate - grace intervenes, something magical happens. When he slices out of bounds, literally out away from his usual pattern of living, Will meets the girl who may or may not be "a gift, and therefore a sign of a giver." (Hobson 118)Allie is God's gift to Will and the answer to his experiment.
Will tries to prove the existence of God, hence, the existence of meaning in life, scientifically. Will thought that if he were to get to the dead tiger's cave and would wait without food, he would anwer, and be assured an answer. The cave is now a tourist attraction but had once been the site where a place where a place for the battle of life had been fought and lost by the tiger. Will brought his sleeping pills to ensure his possible death would be as painless as possiblel, and a flashlight. This experiment, unlike the suicide of Will's father, would pose and answer the question of God's existence: God would either save him or not save him. The grace of God intervenes, but certainly not in the sense that Will had intended. Will gets a severe toothacehe and the acommpanying nausea. Desperate to escape the cave and his physical pain, he cares nothing about his wonderful scientific experiment; he says: "What does a nauseated person care about the Last Days?" (247). Once Will decides to leave the cave, "the toothache and nausea, he notice[s], were gone" (258), and he falls out of the cave, landing in Allie's greenhouse. As Will recuperates and Allie takes care of him, they fall in love. Will finds God in the love he feels for Allie.
Allie is classified as mentally ill by her mother and as the novel opens, she has just escaped from the mental hospital. Her doctor, Dr. Duk, is a ridiculous, ducky man and Allie "deplores the silliness to which she is reduced in trying to deal with him. Where such as Dr. Duk is appointed as gatekeeper to the world of the 'sane,' it is little wonder that a woman of Allison's intelligence should often feel the effort to gain readmission is hardly worthwhile" (Hardy 190). Allie was in the hospital becuase she did not know how o function among people: "Sometimes she thought she had gone crazy rather than have to talk to people" (Second 125). She did not know how to end conversations without causing people embarrassment, so she just kept listening to them until they ended the conversation. When living in the contemporary world got to be too much for her, she hid in her closet, trying to regain a sense of her self. In the hospital, she was treated with "buzzing," or shock, treatments that caused her to forget everything, and so she is fresh, the world is new to her. When she escapes, she is prepared to make a life for herself alone. She goes to the land she inherited from her aunt and moves into the greenhouse there. Her days are spent moving an enormous wood-burning stove, an accomplishment she relishes and which causes her to describe herself as a "hoister." During this period, Allie is rediscovering and renaming the world: "most compelling of all, of course, is her strange, beautiful and disturbing utterance, a way of speaking that seems at times almost a reinvention of language" (Hardy 191). Allie's language and her perception of the world she must try to inhabit make her different and precisely what Will needs as a basis for ordering his own world.
Allie notices something important about the society around her; people use a coded language to avoid confrontation and which "cause[s] people less trouble than words." Unlike the people speaking in the code, Allie means what she says. The people she encounters often do not literally mean what they say:
... she reflected that people asked questions and answered them differently from her. She took words seriously to mean more or less what they said, but other people seemed to use words as signals in another code they had agreed upon. For example, the woman's questions and commands were evidently not to be considered as questions and commands, then answered accordingly with a yes, no, or maybe, but were rather to be considered like the many signboards in the street, such as Try Good Gulf for Better Mileage, then either ignored or acted upon, but even if acted upon, not as an immediate consequence of what the words commanded one to do.Allie fails to actch on to the code and, because of that, her language is a strange, beautiful, and disturbing way of speaking about the world. Allie delights in naming things for herself; she has a more difficult time speaking with other people. When Allie must use Will's name with someone, she falters: "What to call him? Mr. Barrett? Mr. Will? Will Barrett? Bill Barrett? Williston Bibb Barrett? None of the names fit. A name would give him form once and for all. He would flow into its syllables and junctures and there take shape forever. She didn't want him named" (285). For Allie, language, speaking what she means literally and naming things, reveals that the world is new and has meaning. In Conversations With Walker Percy, Percy says, "She flunks ordinary living and collapses into schizophrenia, or something like that. And yet she's the one who has the new life; she starts out with a new life, with hope, with a kind of joyous expectation of things, that she can hoist things, that she can name things" (237). In fact, Allie is so thrilled with words that she writes them down in her notebook and checks their meaning in the library.
Such a code, she reflected, may not be bad. Indeed, it seemed to cause people less trouble than words. At one time she must have known the code. It should not be hard to catch on to. (Second 38-39)
Allie's language is different, but Will understands her perfectly: "Then too, your language is someone unusual. But I understand it. In fact, it means more than other people's. Thus, I could both remember for you and interpret for your" (376-377). Will is delighted that he can understand the world around him because he can now talk about it with Allie. His previous attempts to talk with others about the death-in-life he was living had failed. With Allie he is living a life-in-life because he can talk with her and know that she understands him just as he understands her.
Will and Allie recognize that they are two halves destined to become one whole. Will tells Allie, "Lately I tend to fall down" (131), and she responds, "That's all right. I tend to pick things up. I'm a hoister" (131). He can help her in return: "He would remember for her if she forgot. She would hoist him if he fall" (290). As they fall in love they search for ways to make loving mean love. They have both had horrible experiences with loving. Will loved his father who tried to shoot him, and who ultimately deserted Will when he committed suicide. He loved his wife's money and the good things he could do with it. The people Will had loved had always let him down in some profound way; they left him wondering what love is:
But I've always been suspicious of the word "love," what with its gross abuse and overuse. There is no cheaper word. I can't say tell her I "love" her, because I don't really know what "love" means except as it applies to one's feeling for children - and then it may only mean one's sense of responsiblity for their terrible vulnerability, which they never asked for. One loves children, especially one's own, because there they are, through no doing of their own, born into the same low farce you and I are living but not knowing ityet, being in fact as happy as doodlbugs and you and I would do anything to keep them so. Wouldn't we? Is that love? Perhaps my experiment will shed some light that will be helpful to them later. (227)Allie goes to the library to find out the definition of love, just as she went to the library to "find out about the principles of hoisting, but discovers that although much has been written on the subject of love, none of it has any practical value" (Hardy 215). She reads,
Will has no idea what loving entails; Allie has less of an idean even though she is the one who looks up the literal meaning of the word.
Love begets loveShe responds, "Oh my God... What does all this mean? These people are crazier than I am!" (Second 276). Allie's past experience with love had been with a man who looked at an illustrated sex manual when he made love to her. It is difficult to discern whether Allie ever loved her parents or felt loved by them; she knows they want her money. Love, like grace, has a pretty, but insignificant meaning in contemporary society. Real, Christian love presupposes a willingness to suffer, to die for the beloved. Allie and Will, like O'Connor and Percy, know this. They know that they love they feel for each other is something more than a nice, pretty package, or greeting-card words. She loves him even though he falls down; he loves her even though she forgets.
Love conquers all things
Love ends with hope
Love is a flame to burn out human ills
Love is all truth
Love is truth and truth is beauty
Love is blind
Love is the best
Love is heaven and heaven is love
Love is love's reward
Will comes to life as he grows in love with Allie. His ultimate sacrifice for her happens when he throws his gun over the cliff, discarding at last the legacy of death his father left him. With the last barrier gone, Will and Allie finally love each other physically. "Their ecstasy, their 'coming together,' is no swoon of mindless self-forgetting, but a mutual surrender of selves, each to the other, in which all their human faculties are intensified and heightened, none suspended or obliterated" (Hardy 189). They can do more than perform the act; they can talk about loving with meaning.
"Let's get a house and live in it."
"Okay. Can we make love like that much of the time?"
"As much as you like."
"For true?"
"For true. Would you like to marry?"
"Uh, to marry might be to miscarry."
"Not necessarily. I'll practice law. You grow things in your greenhouse. We can meet after work, have supper. We can walk the Long Trail or go to the beach on your island. Then go to bed irregardless.
"Perhaps crash in a shelter?"
"What?" he said, laughing. "Crash?"
"Sure."
"Okay."
"It is a good regime. Perhaps with you to marry would not miscarry..."
"Will you marry me?"
"Yes."
"It is possible that though marriage in these times seems for some reason to be a troubled, often fatal arrangement, we might not only survive it but revive it."
"Yes, we could survive and revive it." (Second 390-392, passim)
Allbrings Will love and hope. For both of them love had been something to analyze and think about - Allie when she things to understand love by reading the definition, and Will when he considers that loving was doing good things for people. Both realize that their shared love is far more profound than any of their earlier experiences with it. Both of them have fallen vicitm to strange kinds of love earlier in their lives: "But at least in love they are reborn, Allison immanent, Will transcendent, Allison speaking in tongues their holy idiocy, Will listening at last without deafness" (Tharpe 112). With Allie's love, Will can hope that their future will be living a life-in-life, even though the decision to life life entails a great deal of effort. Will gives Allie hope also: "Far from assuring a regression, Will's love probably offers Allison her only real hope for continuing sanity" (Hardy 189). With Will Allie can be herself and speak her odd language and he will understand her. Will goes to see Father Weatherbee, who is uncomfortable with modern faith, the faith of the born-again Christians and chaplains. Father Weatherbee is a symbol of the old Church, the Church in which the symbols signified and people were joined by a common language and set of referents. "So far as Christ is concerend, Barrett is at least for the moment content to detect His presence in the person of the old priest" (Hardy 217). The priest offers Will a glimpse of real faith.
Father Weatherbee has lived in the outcountry, in Mindanao, which is not a conventionally nice place, nor it it conventionally happy. In the poor island community, Father Weatherbee was an apostle, a bringer of the Good News (Second 107). When Will asks the priest to perform the marriage ceremony the old man is shocked out of his complacency into enraged awareness of the wolrd he and Will inhabit, and passionately declares to Will:
How can we be the best dearest most generous people on earth, and at the same time so unhappy? How harsh everyone is here! How restless! How impatient! How worried! How sarcastic! How unhappy! How hateful! How pleasure-loving! How lascivious! Above all, how selfish! Why is it that we have more than any other people, are more generous with what we have, and yet are so selfish and unhappy? Why do we think of nothing but our own pleasure? I cannot believe my eyes at what I see on television. It makes me blush with shame. Did you know what pleasure-seeking leads to cruelty? That is why more and more people beat their children. Children interfere with pleasure. Do you hate children? Why can't we be grateful for our great blessings and thank God?" As he gazed down at the desk, he seemed to have forgotten Will Barrett. His voice sank to a whisper. "Why is it that Americans who are the best dearest most generous people on earth are so unhappy? (410)The answer, according to both O'Conner's and Percy's fiction, is that we have lost our faith and nothing in the world can replace it. For their characters, one shot in the face, one shooting her in the face, one deaf, and the other insane, the answer is harsh and unyielding, but the message remains hopeful.
Will finally realizes in his interview twith the preist athtat God has sent Allie; she is the answer to the cave experiement: "What is it I want from her and him, he wondered, not only want but must have? Is she a gift and therefore a sign of a giver? Could it be that the Lord is here, masquerading behind this simple silly holy face? Am I crazy to want both, her and Him? No, not want, must have. And will have" (411), Will has come to understand that meaning in the words he says, the words he professes to believe in, is absent in the world. These two, Allie and Father Weatherbee, can offer him language that means what it says - Allie because of her delight in language and Father Weatherbee because of his faith in God. The grace of God is present in Allie's holy idiocy and the priest's simple silly holy face.
Will and Allie are both Misfits. They cannot function in the world on their own but need eather other. In O'Connor's story, the grandmother and The Misfit need each other also; as the grandmother reaches out to The Misfit, he shoots off her face. While the grace of God is a beautiful reality, its beauty is not conventional; to really experience the grace of God in the post-Christian world using a slippery, sloppy language, the language must be different and distorted. But it makes possible the relationship between Will and Allie. They have found that through their love for each other they can make words mean, that making love is not just a physical act, but a way of being with each other in the world.
Walker Percy responds to O'Connor's problem, to the problem he sees in the world. His answer: love. He demands that we love God, love the mystery, love the delight, love the language, love the world: "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 the infinite delight, i.e., God. In fact, I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything less" (Signposts 417). O'Connor and Percy demonstrate that they will not settle for halff-hearted attempts at language, at love, at professing Christianity. They demand total commitment to the mystery and delight of God, and through that mystery, revivify love and meaning in the language and symbols of Christianity. O'Connor says,
In this popular piety, we mark our gain in sensibility and our loss in vision. If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced labor camps and in the fums of the gas chamber. (Mystery 37)
O'Connor and Percy think that the barnacles of meaning, the theories, must be removed from Christianity. Both attempt, and both succeed, in removing the blanket and revealing what the grade of God is and how it works in our lives. The faith that is a gift from God is not for the faint of heart, but only for those who have the strength and stomach fo rit. O'Connor's grandmother says nice things about Christianity until she is confronted with death - she has no idea about faith in the mystery of the suffering Christ. For her faith in God's grace is something nice to talk about between nice people. When she is confronted with The Misfit and his gun, she is confronted with the true nature of the grace of God - it is not a warm fuzzy blanket, but the cross. Her acceptance of God's grace in the unlikely person of The Misfit reveals the mystery, that in the face of evil, God reaches out to offer us salvation. In the contemporary western world we do not talk about grace. O'Connor presents grace in such a way that it is stripped of its niceness and revealed for what it is; to paraphrase Dostoevsky, it is a harsh and dreadful reality, but ultimately it is a harsh and dreadful beauty and the only thing that makes life worthwhile.
In Percy's The Second Coming, the language of Christianity is revitalized in the love between Will and Allie. It is a novel about how the "Failure to find this - and what we are talking about, of course, is love - leads to nothingness, an emptiness of mind and soul, the blank stare of teh commuter from the window of the eight-fifteen" (Hobson 130). The second coming of love and meaning means that they can begin their new lives together unhindered by a meaningless language of love; Will says to Allie, "We don't have to go in the cave. The cave is over and done with. We can live up here. How would you like to begin your life?" (Second 378). Will's acceptance of Allie is the acceptance of God's grace, and means that he can live a life-in-life:
Death in the guise of love shall not prevail over me. You, old father old mole, loved me but loved death better and in the name of love sought death for both of us. You only kissed me once and it was the kiss of death. True, death is a way out of a life-which-is-a-living-death. War and shooting is better than such a peace. But what if there is life?
Death in the guise of belief is not going to prevail over me, for believers now believe anything and everything and do not love the truth, are in face in despair of the truth, and that is death.Will will not accept death-in-life or literal death as answers to the questions he poses. Instead he urges us to protest and find God. Percy says, "What I really want to do is tell people what they must do and what they must believe if they want to live" (Tolson 300). In Will we see how we must be if we are to live a Christian life-in-life.
Death in the guise of unbelief is not going to prevail over me, for unbelievers believe nothing, not because truth does not exist but because they have already chosen not to believe, and would not believe, cannot believe, even if the living truth stood before them, and that is death.
Death in the guise of marriage and family and children is not going to prevail over me. What happened to marriage and family that it should have become a travail and a sadness, marriage till death do us part yes but long dead before the parting, home and fireside and kiddies such a travail and a deadliness as to make a man run out into the night with his hands over his head? Show me that Norman Rockwell picture of the American familty at Thanskgiving dinner and I'll show you the first faint outline of the death's-head.
God may be good, family and marriage and children and home may be good, grandma and grandpa may act wise, the Thanksgiving table may be groaning with God's goodness and bounty, all the folks healthy and happy, but something is missing. What is this sadness here? Why do the folks put up with it? The truth seeker does not. Instead of joining hands with the folks and bowing his head in prayer, the truth seeker sits in an empty chair as invisible as Banquo's ghost, yelling at the top of his voice: Where is it? What is missing? Where did it go? I won't have it! I won't have it! Why this sadness here? Don't stand for it! Get up! Leave! Let the boat people sit down! Go live in a cave until you've found the missing thief who is robbing you. But at least protest. Stop, thief! What is missing? God? Find him! (314-315 passim)
O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find and Percy's The Second Coming signal the end of the world, a world devoid of meaning because the Christian language and symbols have no meaning:
One reason the poet and the novelist these days have a hankering for apocolypse, the end of the old world and the beginning of the new, is surely their sense that only then can language be renewed, by destroying the old and starting over. Things fall apart but words regain their value. A boy sees an ordinary shell on the beach, picks it up as if it were a jewel he had found, recognizes it, names it. Now the name does not conceal the shell but celebrates it. (Signposts 306)Both works also signal a new beginning, a new meaning in language, a new trust in each other, and a new meaning in Christianity. And the revitalized meaning is better than what it replaces: "The present age is better than Christendom. In the old Christendom, everyone was a Christian and hardly anyone thought twice about it. But in the present age the survivor... becomes a wayfarer in the desert" (314). As the inhabitants of the present age, we have the opportunity to be Will and Allie and reinvent Chrstendom and in so doing reinvent meaning in what we say and in what we do. It is this rejection and rebuilding that will save our souls and will create life-in life.
Works Cited
Baumgaertner, Jill P. Flannery O'Connor: A Proper Scaring. Wheaton, IL: Shaw, 1988.
Drake, Robert. Flannery O'Connor: A Critical Essay. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1966.
Eggenschwiler, David. The Chrsitian Humanism of Flannery O'Connor. Detroit: Wayne State U P, 1972.
Grimshaw, James A., junior. Flannery O'Connor Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 1981.
Hardy, John Edward. The Fiction of Walker Percy. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1987.
Hobson, Linda Whitney. Understanding Walker Percy. Columbia, South Carolina: U of South Carolina P, 1988.
Kennedy, Arthur. "'The Good Under Construction': Flannery O'Connor's Gift." University of St. Thomas Alumni Magazine. Fall 1990.
Lawson, Lewis A. and Victor A. Kramer, ed. Conversations with Walker Percy. Jackson: UP of MS, 1985.
McFarland, Dorothy Tuck. Flannery O'Connor. New York: Unger, 1976.
Marcel, Gabriel. The Mystery of Being. Lanham, MD: U P of America, 1950.
O'Connor, Flannery. A Good Man is Hard to Find. San Diego: Harcourt, 1955.
O'Connor, Flannery. Mystery and Manners. Ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, 1957.
Percy, Walker. The Message in the Bottle. New York: Farrar, 1975.
Percy, Walker. The Second Coming. New York: Pocket, 1980.
Percy, Walker. Signposts in a Strange Land. Ed. Patrick Samway. New York: Farrar, 1991.
Salter, Mary Jo. "Seeing and Believing." The New Republic. 24 April 1989. 34-38.
Tharpe, Jac. Walker Percy. Boston: Twayne, 1983.
Tolson, Jay. Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy. New York: Simon, 1992.
APPENDIX
My project developed after hearing a comment by my advisor in the Philosophic Themes in Literature course (Fall 1990). To paraphrase, she said, "Everything that was good scientifically and culturally, that flowering of beautiful, good things ended in the fumes of the gas chamber." The idea that the "nicest of all people" could partner in genocide is horrifying. How could this happen? Could it happen again? Why is it that when we talk about the Holocaust, we are not screaming and crying? I decided I wanted to think more about this topic and I wanted to know what other people thought.
I began to read. I read some of the Existentialists and some of the Christians - Sarte, Camus, O'Connor. I read non-fiction by John Gardner and Walker Percy. I read as much as I could for a year. Much of what I read was difficult to read, but also thought-provoking. Like anyone else attempting a massive project like mine, fulfilling the requirements for two major programs, my task seemed daunting: how do I take what I learned and turn it into a paper full of meaning and answering my own questions?
When I actually began to write, I thought to answer the question, "Why do people read?" and "Why do people need stories?" Maybe I should have asked, "Do people need stories?" and if they do, my second question should have been, "How do we get people to read?" My focus shifted when I fell in love with the Existentialist Novel and how it compels the reader to actually see the world as it is - rather than seeing the world through Christian-tinted lenses. Erich Fromom's Escape From Freedom was suggested to me for background information. The book details the history of the Judeo-Christian West, and explains what has gone wrong. My paper became a ten-page history of the world. At the suggestion of my advisor and committee, I discarded that draft and concentrated on two of the stories I most enjoyed: Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find and Walker Percy's The Second Coming. This paper is the result, many revisions later, of that shift in focus.
I think this paper is a good beginning to what needs to be said about Christian novelists and what is wrong in the Judeo-Christian West. We lack a consensus - and that lack is bad for us.
I do think there are significant problems with the paper.
I feel like much of the language, even by the experts, is vague: crowds of anonymouse people, the problem with the Western world, language and what it means... it's a long list. My major source for the paper, Percy's non-fiction uses vague terms. I did try to clarify that I am considering a problem affecting all of Western society; the problem is that words and symbols that united us a century ago no longer mean what they did; a simple example is "freedom" and another is "frontier." I think the problem affects every person living in the Western world because we have inherited a Judeo-Christian history and live in a society based on laws and practices implemented by people who lived Judeo-Christian traditions. I think that the answer I arrive at, that to recreate meaning in what we say and in what we do, we must practice love in the Christian sense - that the lover is willing to die for the beloved. Such love is possible, say O'Connor, Percy, and me, only through the saving grace of God.
There is so much more to add to the paper. The story and novel I chose are rich in language and meaning. I am surprised with the amount of detail I cut because it did not pertain to my thesis. I think I could have chosen one work or the other and the finished product would have been the same length. Each time I opened the novel or the story, I found something else important and relevant. One of the most interesting details that occurred to me only recently was just how much The Misfit resembles Will before Will accepts God's grace when he finds love with Allie. It could be another paper.
I did incorporate most suggestions by my advisor and committee. Even when I didn't use one, I was forced to consider why I wasn't using the the suggestion. Obviously, the best suggestion was to concentrate on the story and novel rather than the background information - which I love, but which didn't a paper make. The other suggestion I tried to use was to comment on my quotations. At times I thought I was being too repetitive, but then I saw a connection between the point I wanted to make and the quotation that the reader could always see, not having read the text as closly as I have. Finally, another good suggestion that I used was to write the paper longhand before using the word processor. The first few drafts were very fragmented, but writing longhand forces the writer to only include what is worth a tired hand.
One of the suggestions I chose not to use was to cut the first two or three pages. I remember the first time I read Percy's essay and how I thought for days about the questions he poses. I wanted to imiate that format. Also, as my advisor pointed out, the first few pages define the world that Percy sees and comments on. I think that is important.
