Subject: Three Questions
From: Eric Simpson (JamzSimp@AOL.COM)
Date: Mon Jun 07 1999 - 06:38:47 EDT
1. The Second Coming was the first Percy novel I read. This was eight years
ago, and I haven't returned to it yet, but I think that the romance of the
"abnormal" couple speaks to an ironic truth that maybe someone else could
address better than myself. (It's also found in another philosophical
writer, Iris Murdoch, in her novel, "The Black Knight".)
2. I heard a novelist quote Percy on NPR as saying something like, "serious
novelists are failed suicides". Does anyone know the context of this remark?
3. I wonder what kind of response those more recently immersed in Lancelot
would have to John Gardner's criticism of the work? After praising Percy for
his seriousness and tecnique, Gardner writes:
"...Certainly no answer can be deduced from the novel except Kierkegaard's
consciously unreasonable 'leap of faith' -- a blind, existential affirmation
of the logically insensible Christian faith. But surely everyone must know by
now that Kierkegaard's answer is stupid and dangerous. Why Abraham's leap of
faith and not Hitler's? Lancelot himself makes that point.
"The reader has come all this way in critical goodwill -- ignoring Percy's
errors of scientific and mythic fact, though important arguements hang on
them (human females are by no means, as Percy thinks, the only ones who make
love face-to-face, and Malorey's Guinevere was by no means indifferent to the
betrayal). And from interest in the story and arguement, the reader has put
up, too, with quite gross aesthetic mistakes on Percy's part. Even granting
the funny way Southerners name their children, the allegory is too obviously
contrived; it distracts us from drama to mere message....
"From interest in the drama and arguement, we blinked all this, but when the
end comes and we see the issue has been avoided and evaded, as it nearly
always is in our stupid, whining, self-pitying modern novels, we hurl away
the book. When everyone's talking, as Lancelot does, about the world having
no values, it's not a good time to rehash *The Brother's Karamazov* (Is there
evil? Does it imply God?) or offer a sniveling version of Ayn Rand, that is,
'Maybe---just maybe---Lancelot is right." Everybody, these days, is thinking
and feeling what Walker Percy is thinking and feeling....Over and over, film
after film, novel after novel, people keep whining about the black abyss and
turning in their ignorance to Nietzche and Kierkegaard, as if no one ever
answered them (George Sedgwick, Brand Blanshard, Roman Ingarten, Paul Weiss,
dozens more).
"Fiction, at its best, is a means of discovery, a philosophical method. By
that standard, Walker Percy is not a very good novelist; in fact, *Lancelot*,
for all its dramatic and philosophical intensity, is bad art, and what's
worse, typical bad art. Like Tom Stoppard's plays, it fools around with
philosophy, only in this case not for laughs but for fashionable groans.
Art, it seems to me, should be a little less pompous, a lot more serious. It
should stop sniveling and go for answers or else shut up" (On Writers and
Writing, 122, 123).
Thanks!
Eric Simpson
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