Father Smith and Dr Tom More

Fyodor Gutman (kenrose@IX.NETCOM.COM)
Mon, 31 Mar 1997 21:07:05 -0600

I think Linda hit it dead on.

I guess what I was getting at was that Percy was showing how hard it is
for religious persons to express themselves in this age. I mean,
you've got one foot in the world and one foot in eternity, and to
express what you really mean, i.e., to risk being termed a religious
nut or Heaven's Gater, takes great courage. By definition, courage is
rare. Tom, I believe, agrees with Fr Smith, but he's still got career
aspirations, and Fr Smith has already been written off by the
cognoscenti.

Percy's technique is not original but it's a good one: let a character
enunciate the author's ethos, but if that strikes some as too strong,
the enunciator can always be shown to be unreliable. I truly think
that Percy wasn't so much interested in converting people as he was
enticing them to think for themselves, to go beyond the common wisdom
of what Heidegger called the they-self, to, in other words, go beyond
everydayness. I feel like Percy must have believed that once people
started thinking independently that there was a good chance they'd come
to many of the same conclusions he did.

Walker Percy, it seems to me, felt that novelists--Christian
novelists--performed a different function than priests (or ministers).

In any case, I would commend to all a rereading of Percy's essay "Notes
on a Novel about the End of the World." And if you haven't read Mary
Deems Howlands' book "The Gift of the Other," try to find it. Mary did
a great job, IMHO, of explaining the importance of Gabriel Marcel's
concept of intersubjectivity in Percy's work. Her analysis of Tom's
relation to Fr Smith in The Thanatos Syndrome is worth reading.

Ken