Sutter's lonely leap


Subject: Sutter's lonely leap
From: David Welch (welchfam@GTE.NET)
Date: Tue Nov 30 1999 - 01:05:46 EST


I attempted to post the following message the other night (in response
to Marshall Smith's observation about Sutter Vaught), but something
went amiss in the delivery. I'll try again ...

* * * * * * *

The epigraph from the German Catholic theologian Romano Guardini in The
Last Gentleman holds the key to understanding Sutter Vaught specifically
and, I think, to understanding the thrust of Percy's work in general:

' ... We know now that the modern world is coming to an end ... at the
same time, the unbeliever will emerge from the fogs of secularism. He
will cease to reap benefit from the values and forces developed by the
very Revelation he denies ... Loneliness in faith will be terrible.
Love will disappear from the face of the public world, but the more
precious will be that love which flows from one lonely person to another
... the world to come will be filled with animosity and danger, but it
will be a world open and clean.' (Romano Guardini, The End of the
Modern World)

For me, that passage makes the relationship between Will Barrett and
Sutter Vaught luminous. It sheds light on so many of the relationships
in Percy's novels ... to say nothing of the expressed urgency of his
work in semiotics.

Dave Welch

Marshall Smith wrote:

> Here's something I posted some time ago re the subject of Sutter. I
> think
> his importance is overlooked in Percy talk and on this list.
>
> I'm intrigued by the idea of Sutter Vaught as a depraved,
> secular, brilliant, cynical version of Abraham. With his obsessive
> journaling about sex and angelism, Sutter seems to have entered the
> religious
> stage of the Kierkegaardian progression, albeit in an upside down
> fashion.
> Perhaps it's Percy's wry comment on the age - a brilliant seeker
> finding
> nothing in the modern world worth seeking besides sex and re-entry
> into the
> human condition from his Descartes-skewed separation. Of course it's
> more
> complicated than that, as Percy would always caution.



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