My concern is with intersubjectivity and continuity in the character of Dr.
Tom More. That concern is trivial if Dr. Tom More is a careerist. What
about those paper airplanes, the birdhouse and the bourbon in the bottom
drawer? I am obstinant, but open to textual evidence. Tom More doesn't
need the Qualitarians to do anything but let him alone. He has better
scientific and clinical credentials than anyone in the story, including Max
Gottlieb. There's just that little matter of his parole; he wants them to
quit bugging him. He neither needs nor wants any help with his career.
The Tom More of TS has a past; the Tom More of LitR. That Tom More was
not the Stoic the old soul doctor, Sigmund Freud, is reputed to have been.
When his daughter dies horribly and a marriage falls in ruins, he
overindulges in two decidely paraprofessional forms of self-medication:
plenty of b&bw and hijinks at HoJo. Maybe I have a tin ear? Isn't
that Percy talk for the dark night of the soul? deepest despair? The
objective order providing the necessary basis for the deep moral
commitment which opens the door to religious faith is in ruins. The
lizard in the pool at HoJo and the grass in the cracks of the freeway are
just symptoms. I'm surprised Tom More never says, "Hickey, the booze just
doesn't taste good anymore." Intimate acquaintance with brain cancer can
ruin the metaphysical pipe dreams of amateurs like Dr. Tom More.
Tom More manicured the golf course greens and stared at the ceiling in his
minimum security feelings. Things fell in place? Time cooled and
smoothed out the scars of despair? Well, this is fiction. I just don't
know what Tom More thought when he heard (I know what I think when I read
it) "tenderness leads to the gas chambers." Did he, for instance, think
"There goes the Hippocratic Oath?" If he is a careerist, just hoping to
rebuild his practice, it doesn't matter what he thinks. But then TS
wouldn't be much of a novel.
I love homework! I'll read "The Gift of the Other" if you'll read John
Edward Hardy's "The Fiction of Walker Percy," University of Illinois,
1987. My sense of Percy/Fr. Smith as prophets is overly clear in
"Walker Percy: Language, Neuropsychology and Moral Tradition," in Anne
Harrington's "So Human a Brain," Dibner Institute/Birkhauser, Boston,
1992; I was bringing the news to neuroscientists.
Ed