Subject: Re: The Importance of Ernest Being
From: David Alan Beck (dabeck@IUPUI.EDU)
Date: Mon Jul 19 1999 - 15:50:50 EDT
I agree with Brannon. Percy should be read without having to hold up
Kierkegaardian ideas to compare him with. While obviously K. is important
to Percy's thought, I doubt that he mapped out his novels with Either/Or
opened before him.
Brannon is correct:
Although the
> dramatization of Kierkegaard's theories obviously plays a substantial
role in
> Percy's fiction, there are, of course, other things going on there,
other
> threads that, if followed, reveal a marked maturation from one novel to
the
> next--race and racial identity, for instance, and I'm sure there are
others
Intersubjectivity is essential to Percy. But that is not to say that Percy
is Marcellian. Language and semiotics are also important. But that doesn't
make him Peircian (or fill in the -ian prefix).
Percy is Percean. He "borrows" from others, but also shapes his influences
for his own beliefs. He uses Kierkegaardian terms, esp. in the MG, but he
doesn't, from my reading anyway, use them in the exact same way as K.
The religious stage or sphere--to me--for Percy is not what I read K. as
describing. (Again, I think that this why I find the ending of Taylor's
otherwise excellent book as so unconvincing.)
As for the Bellow comparison, we might be comparing apples and oranges. It
seems to me that Bellow has a broader range of ideas, especially regarding
Western culture, than Percy. Further, I agree with someone else's posting
regarding More Die of Heartbreak--it shows that maturation of Bellow's
writing (why it wasnt on the 100 list is puzzling to me). But my
maturation theory goes out the window when I think of the last three
novellas, which I thought, in comparison to his other works, were weak.
There's my two cents.
David Beck
"I am inclined to deny that any work is
philosophical if we cannot discern in it
what may be called the sting of reality."
-Gabriel Marcel
Creative Fidelity
On Mon, 19 Jul 1999, Brannon Costello wrote:
> Thomas and List--
>
> I'm finding this Hemingway/Percy/Bellow thread fascinating--certainly among
> the most engaging since I've been lurking. A comment on Thomas's assertion of
> Percy's non-maturation as a novelist: I would probably agree that The
> Thanatos Syndrome's treatment of Kierkegaard's doesn't sufficiently advance
> The Moviegoer's, although to be honest what little I know of Kierkegaard
> comes mostly filterged through Percy, so I'm hardly an expert there.
However,
> I think it's a mistake to automatically equate a (possible) failure to
> develop the Kierkegaardian aspects of his fiction with a complete lack of
> development over the course of his novelistic career. Although the
> dramatization of Kierkegaard's theories obviously plays a substantial role in
> Percy's fiction, there are, of course, other things going on there, other
> threads that, if followed, reveal a marked maturation from one novel to the
> next--race and racial identity, for instance, and I'm sure there are others
> as well. While he may not necessarily show a steady growth as a
> Kierkegaardian novelist (and again, I'm not particularly qualified to speak
> here--others who know more than I might be able to champion his
> Kierkegaardian credentials more forcefully), he definitely demonstrates
> growth as a novelist, no qualifying adjective. As far as how his work stacks
> up against Bellow's--I'll let the list hash that out :).
>
> I suppose I should give myself a proper introduction, now that I've left
> lurk-dom behind: I'm Brannon Costello, and I'll be beginning my PhD work in
> English at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville in the fall. I recently
> finished up my MA at the University of Southern Mississippi (in Hattiesburg,
> MS, that LITR's notorious Knothead refuge), where I wrote a thesis on (as you
> may have surmised) race and racial identity in Percy's novels, an important
> aspect of his fiction that has gone relatively unexamined. Other than that,
> life is pretty non-descript: one wife, two cats, lots of books :)
>
> And Jon Cusack should play Binx.
>
> Best,
> BC
>
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