Subject: Re: Percy and Friendships...
From: Bryon McLaughlin (bmclaughlin@NAZARENE.ORG)
Date: Fri Jul 30 1999 - 13:18:15 EDT
I know little of Percy's interest in philosophy outside the existentialists.
Can anyone tell me if Percy had an interest in process philosophy and
process metaphysics? Thanks.
-----Original Message-----
From: Walker Percy Literary and Philosophic Topics
[mailto:PERCY-L@listserv.lsu.edu]On Behalf Of David Dreith
Sent: Wednesday, July 15, 1998 8:37 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list PERCY-L
Subject: Re: Percy and Friendships...
In an earlier posting, Jim Woods wrote:
>I think it interesting to contrast Flannery O'Connor's response to secular
>critics and, occassionally, her friends, when they disparaged the faith in
>relationship to writing etc.
>She was considerably more 'feisty' than Walker, a cultural difference that
>someone who is closer to Southern history and society than I am might help
us
>to understand.
>Jim
I tend to think the difference between the two responses towards secular
critics lays in what each chose to write about. O'Connor wrote unabashedly
from a Southern perspective largely about Southern subjects while Percy
maintained that the fact that he was a Southerner was non-essential to
understanding his work and that he was writing on problems of the human
condition in general.
I realize that I am speculating as I am far more familiar with Percy's
responses than with O'Connor's responses, but I think I may have shared more
experience with O'Connor. When I left Pensacola, FL to attend Stanford
University, many peers made summary judgements about me, my faith, and my
abilities (or lack thereof) as a scholar simply because I was from a town in
the South which has gained notariety for intolerance. Even though the
assumptions about my faith were usually erroneous, my faith was dismissed as
being counterproductive to scholarship. I tended to be feisty and almost
defensive not only of my faith but of Southern culture and against academia
for not demonstrating the common sense God gave an Alabama cotton farmer
(perhaps I'm using a little too much hyperbole to demonstrate my point).
Percy on the other hand viewed problems in the human condition as global (or
at least Western). His was not to defend the faith but rather it seems that
his faith was his solution to many of these problems. By being feisty, he
would have allowed he and his ideas to be relegated into a subset of
thinking
known as Southern literature and therefore allowing them to be diminished.
That's my guess anyway.
David Dreith
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