Walker Percy: Signifying Race

A Special Session at the 1995 MLA Convention, Chicago, December 27-30

CHAIR
Gary M. Ciuba, Associate Professor of English, Kent State University

PANELISTS
Doreen Fowler, Professor of English, University of Mississippi
Michael Kobre, Assistant Professor of English, Queens College
Roberta Maguire, Teaching Assistant, Department of English, University of Maryland
Anne Wyatt-Brown, Assistant Professor, Program in Linguistics, University of Florida
Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Richard J. Milbauer Professor of History, University of Florida


This special session on "Walker Percy: Signifying Race" brought together two central concerns of Percy's work: his life-long observation of black-white relations in the South and his commitment to exploring the sign-system of language. It sought to answer the kind of questions that Toni Morrison has pondered in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination as she examines the presence of black characters in works by white American writers: "How does literary utterance arrange itself when it tries to imagine an Africanist other? What are the signs, the codes, the literary strategies designed to accommodate this encounter? What does the inclusion of Africans or African Americans do to and for the work?" (16). This panel explored how race gets symbolized and verbalized in Percy's fiction. All of the papers began with the assumption that race in Percy's novels could be usefully understood by beginning with Percy's own understanding of humanity as Homo loquens.

In "Will and Walker Percy: Contrasting Family Views on Race," Bertram Wyatt-Brown examined how Walker Percy's interest in language helped him move beyond the paternalism of his surrogate father, William Alexander Percy. Although Cousin Will's attitude of noblesse oblige greatly influenced Walker, the novelist's fascination with linguistics led him to a more complex understanding of African Americans than can be heard in Will Percy's Lanterns on the Levee. Walker was not a trained linguist, but his sensitivity to dialect, code-switching, and speech acts revealed an understanding of how black characters use language as a strategy for survival and subversion in a white-dominated world.

Doreen Fowler's "Walker Percy and the Collapse of Racial Difference" served as a counterpoint to the preceding paper by arguing that Percy's fiction works to dismantle many conventional racial distinctions. It showed how polarities, so necessary to meaning in language, unravel with regard to race in Percy's novels. In The Moviegoer, the figures of Mercer, the black carnival krewe, and the African-American churchgoer on Ash Wednesday challenge Binx's assumptions about racial otherness.

In "White Man's Burden: The Dialogics of Race and Class in The Last Gentleman," Michael Kobre offered a Bakhtinian reading that itself seemed part of a dialogue with the two preceding papers. He examined how Will Barrett internalizes the Walker-Will Percy debate on race that Anne Wyatt-Brown and Bertram Wyatt-Brown discussed as the last gentleman searches to orient himself in the turbulent 1960s when the differences that Doreen Fowler noted are at once being broken down and built up again. In a series of microdialogues, Will confronts the patrician claims of his ancestors that resound in his consciousness. By the end of the novel he rejects the values of the past by rejecting the voices of his predecessors.

In "Albert Murray, Walker Percy, and the Intersection of Symbol and Race in Lancelot," Roberta Maguire considered how Percy was shaped by the same kind of dialogic encounters that Michael Kobre's paper analyzed in Percy's fiction. She showed that the previously undocumented friendship between Percy and Murray helped to refine Percy's own thinking on race and to shape his fictional presentation of African Americans. Lancelot, for example, not only contains allusions to Murray's writings but also exemplifies Murray's concept of the blues hero in the character of Elgin.

Submitted by Gary M. Ciuba