Earnestly Being Unimportant!?


Subject: Earnestly Being Unimportant!?
From: Jim Woods (TrlBlzrOne@AOL.COM)
Date: Mon Jul 19 1999 - 21:48:18 EDT


In a message dated 7/19/99 7:51:17 PM !!!First Boot!!!, dabeck@IUPUI.EDU
writes:

> 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

I think this captures many facets of Percy's 'use' of Kierkegaard, Peirce,
Sartre, Camus, his uncle, his father, Faulkner, Shelby Foote, Hemingway,
Thomas Aquinas, Chapel Hill,Columbia Medical School etc....he adapted them
all...and focused their best stuff on what he thought were the central
theological/philosophical/cultural issues of his own time and context. What
is so remarkable about Percy is that he had done the 'Romantic' schtick and
found that horse could run! He and Foote part company there as do Samway and
Tolson.

Put another way, Percy's chararcters do not go to Africa on Safari to be shot
by their wives....they run around in the ruins of a Catholic Church being
shot at while their wives run off with the equivalent of third rate Druids
and the country falls apart <G> And when push comes to shove, they are
looking for ways to reconstruct their faith...not blow their brains out.
When you come to the end of your rope you........laugh!

Which leads me to a question. Why all the emphasis here on Percy and
Southern Stoicism? I am grateful to those who point out that Southern
Stoicism was so much a part of :Percy's culture, family etc. But Percy said
himself that he was NOT a southern writer and did not aspire to that mantle.
This seems to me more than a desire to avoid the Faulknerian colossus astride
Southern letters Foote chose to worship at that temple, Percy did not. So.
Foote did what he did and Percy did something risky. <G>

Percy's interest was America and what it is was becoming as a society that,
along with Germany and Russia (England as a side player), had decided to risk
all on the Romantic myth. He saw himself as an American writer, not a
'Southern' one. In his stories, the characters are the children of Ralph
Waldo Emerson--Romantics who refuse grace and invent lapsometers. Dyadic
Unitarians. Fortunately, events overtake them <G>

Percy 'went to war' while being cured of tuberculosis in the Adirondacks.
But the war he enlisted in did not end in 1945. This was the way in which
Percy became a prophet...and as a prophet, Percy's literature became his
triadic (Christian) 'take' on his own life and our times.

For that reason, I think, any effort to Percy in terms of his intellectual,
cultural and familial antecedants will fall short of the mark... triadically
speaking <G> He should be taken at his word (triadically speaking!)

Jim



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