Subject: Re: The Importance of Ernest Being
From: Thomas Dean (TSDean@SHERIN.COM)
Date: Tue Jul 20 1999 - 09:30:33 EDT
Rhonda,
First the really important issue: Can you see John Malkovich as Binx? As runner-up, I would suggest Spalding Gray - nice Waspy introspection there already, not much acting necessary, really.
But Malkovich is such a great brooder, and I have always suspected that Binx has a basic spookiness if you meet him in person. Wasn't it Binx who, standing in his aunt's parlor, rebuffed his old college classmate's invitation to be more sociable with, "What would we talk about?" Malkovich could do that sooo right.
As to the Kierkegaardian psychological type issue, I think I'm getting boring, so the last I'll say is that I disagree that the realms of the aesthetic, universal and absolute, to which you refer, are relevant to SK's psychological works. _Sickness Unto Death_, the treatise on despair from which I contend that all WP protagonists spring as from Jupiter's brow, is written under a different pseudionym from _Fear and Trembling_, which gives us the concepts to which you refer. It does not surprise me that WP does without F&T in his psychologial typing.
In any case, I am tired of dishing on poor WP, who is one of my favorite authors (full disclosure on my middlebrow tastes: Winston Churchill, Graham Greene, Robert Crais, Umberto Eco, Ernest Hemingway, and some days P.G. Wodehouse and/or John Keegan).
>>> Rhonda McDonnell <rhonda_mcdonnell@HOTMAIL.COM> 07/20/99 02:27AM >>>
Thomas--I'm not sure how to take the idea of WP's characters corresponding
to "one and only one Kierkegaardian psychological state." Are you moving
out of the realm of Kierkegaard's stages, then? Otherwise I'd have to argue
that Binx clearly travels through all three stages, not reaching the
religious stage until the final Dostoevskian gesture. Furthermore, Binx's
journey isn't linear but a sort of one step up and two back throughout much
of the novel.
By the way, I'd like to suggest Oliver Platt as Binx.
Rhonda McDonnell
Arizona State University
>From: Thomas Dean <TSDean@SHERIN.COM>
>Reply-To: Walker Percy Literary and Philosophic Topics
><PERCY-L@listserv.lsu.edu>
>To: Multiple recipients of list PERCY-L <PERCY-L@listserv.lsu.edu>
>Subject: Re: The Importance of Ernest Being
>Date: Mon, 19 Jul 1999 16:59:12 -0400
>
>I should have stated my thought more narrowly in my earlier post. My
>thesis is not that Percy swallowed Kierkegaard whole, but rather that
>across WP's career his central characters always correspond to one and only
>one Kierkegaardian psychological state, and never emerge into real
>individuality.
>
>In the Last Gentlemen, Will Barrett is in feminine despair (potentiality
>struggling with actuality, of the transcendent failing to make reentry into
>the immanent) and in the Second Coming, he is in masculine despair (the
>immanent unable to attain the transcendent). But in neither book is Will
>Barrett much more than that. Lancelot, Sutter, Binx, Tom Moore, and Allie
>all have their roots more in The Sickness Unto Death than in the American
>south.
>
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