From JHForest at cs.com Thu Mar 3 09:45:17 2005 From: JHForest at cs.com (JHForest at cs.com) Date: Thu, 3 Mar 2005 09:45:17 EST Subject: [percy-l] re The Thanatos Syndrome Message-ID: <1e3.3682375a.2f587cfd@cs.com> Attached is a book review I did nearly 20 years ago. I share it with you as the issues Walker Percy explored in the book under review, "The Thanatos Syndrome," seem ever more current. Timely reading. Satire with the bite of Jonathan Swift. Jim * * * The Thanatos Syndrome by Walker Percy Farrar Straus Giroux, New York 1987, 372 pp reviewed by Jim Forest Walker Percy is southern and Catholic, Kurt Vonnegut northern and secular, not minor differences, but perhaps they recognize each other as relatives. Both are inclined to use comedy, at times the slapstick variety, in order to talk about some of the unfunniest subjects in the world, like war, euthanasia, abortion, and other justifications we cook up for killing one another. Percy's hero in this book, as in his earlier novel, Love in the Ruins, is Dr. Thomas More, resident of a rural Louisiana parish (what we yankees call a county) and a direct descendent of St. Thomas More. Like his ancestor, he has been a prisoner, but for selling amphetamines to truckers rather than for acts of fideility to conscience. Also like his ancestor, he is a Catholic, except in the current generation, things being what they are, More's connection to his Church is threadbare. Still there is a bit of religious glue holding body and soul together. Tom More isn't able to make himself comfortable with the contemporary mercies that pave the way to the gas chamber and the abortorium. In The Thanatos Syndrome we encounter a few psychiatrists who makes heaps of money running the Qualitarian Center, where the old and/or feeble-minded are provided with Death with Dignity. In their spare time, using a federal grant, the clever doctors are in the midst of a local experiment that they regard as the best idea since fluoride in toothpaste. While sticking to bottled water for themselves, they are lacing the water supply with a substance (borrowed from a nearby nuclear generator) that knocks out the part of the brain that makes people dangerous and miserable. Violent crime has evaporated in the area effected. Black prisoners are singing the old spirituals as they cheerfully pick cotton on the local prison farm. Sexual-transmitted diseases have practically disappeared. No more AIDS, no more herpes. At first glance it looks like the doctors have found a chemical method to mass produce the lifestyle of the saints. People drinking the local water aren't inclined to do the sorts of things that make headlines in The National Enquirer. (But not quite. It turns out that adults who drink too much of the local water find that the ideal sex-partners are children.) The part of the brain made dormant also happens to be where the soul and conscience hang out. It is the patch that has most to do with creativity, verbal skills, and what makes us who we are. Those drinking the local water are better at telling you exactly where St. Louis is than in making a sentence that includes a subject, verb and object. They are a whiz at bridge but incapable of theology. Percy links what is now happening in manipulative medical technology in the US and what was going on with psychiatry in Germany from the twenties until the collapse of the Nazis, at the same time pointing out that you don't have to like Hitler (the German shrinks didn't) to end up doing some of the worst things that happened in Hitler's Germany. Percy integrates a steady stream of observation about the American Way of Life and what is like living in "the Age of Not Knowing What to Do." For example here is Tom More reflecting about a patient who, before the local water ironed out all depression and anxiety, felt like a failure: "What is failure? Failure is what people do ninety-nine percent of the time. Even in the movies: ninety-nine outtakes for one print. But in the movies they don't show the failures. What you see are the takes that work. So it looks as if every action, even going crazy, is carried off in a proper, rounded- off way. It looks as if real failure is unspeakable. TV has screwed up millions of people with their little rounded-off stories. Because that is not the way life is. Life is fits and starts, mostly fits." Percy continues his assessment of contemporary American Catholicism that began in Love in the Ruins. Fr. Kev Kevin, the former director of the Love Clinic, has abandoned the controls of the Orgasmatron computer and given up the priesthood as well. He is "into Hinduism," has married a former Maryknoll nun who is taking up witchcraft, and together they run a marriage encounter center in a rehabilitated stable. In The Thanatos Syndrome we meet a very different kind of priest: Fr. Simon Smith, a modern stylite, fasting atop a fire- watch tower as the book begins. People consider him crazy as a loon. Maybe he is, but he's a saint as well. His "confession" is the keystone of the novel. Here we discover that his vocation is an on-going penitential work having chiefly to do with the devastation his father helped bring about in Europe -- he is the son of one of the liberal German physicians (anti-Nazis one and all) whose work to "relieve suffering" via euthanasia helped prepare the way for the Holocaust. Father Smith's big discovery in life was that "the only people I got along with were bums, outcasts, pariahs, family skeletons, and the dying." It isn't a boast. "I don't know about Mother Theresa, but I [did what I did] because I liked it, not for love of the wretched ... dying people were the only people I could stand. They were my kind ... Dying people, suffering people, don't lie." [October 28, 1987] * * * Jim & Nancy Forest Kanisstraat 5 / 1811 GJ Alkmaar / The Netherlands tel: (country code 31)(area code 72) 511 2545 Jim's e-mail: jhforest at cs.com Nancy's e-mail: forestflier at cs.com Orthodox Peace Fellowship web site: http://www.incommunion.org Jim & Nancy Forest web site: http://incommunion.org/forest-flier/ * * * -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From JHForest at cs.com Thu Mar 3 09:54:49 2005 From: JHForest at cs.com (JHForest at cs.com) Date: Thu, 3 Mar 2005 09:54:49 EST Subject: [percy-l] a question re The Thanatos Syndrome Message-ID: Here's a question a friend sent regading The Thanatos Syndrome. Any comments? Jim Forest * * * Thanks for the review of the Percy book. I haven't read it, so I pose the following as a hypothesis you can confirm or reject. You (and many others on this list) probably already know it, but even the title appears to be ironic, given what you say about the content of the book. In Freud's early work he thought of drives as biologically driven to preserve the species, borrowing rather directly from Darwin. After World War I, Freud changed his theory and postulated the existence of a thanatos drive, a drive toward death and destruction that undid the positive direction of the eros drive. Freud's later theory never caught on in psychiatry or psychology; it is too much opposed to the axioms of modern science (and evolution, the modern way of conceptualizing change across time). But Percy evidently wanted us to think that modern psychiatry had itself fallen into the grips of the very drive in which it did not want to believe. David * * * -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From wriddick at usa.net Fri Mar 4 09:12:43 2005 From: wriddick at usa.net (Wade Riddick) Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2005 08:12:43 -0600 Subject: [percy-l] a question re The Thanatos Syndrome In-Reply-To: Message-ID: A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 1868 bytes Desc: not available URL: From rgeckert at yahoo.com Sat Mar 5 00:50:15 2005 From: rgeckert at yahoo.com (Robert Eckert) Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2005 21:50:15 -0800 (PST) Subject: [percy-l] re The Thanatos Syndrome In-Reply-To: <1e3.3682375a.2f587cfd@cs.com> Message-ID: <20050305055016.66743.qmail@web21004.mail.yahoo.com> Jim, Peter Kramer makes some interesting observations regarding Percy's prescience _TS_ is his book _Listening to Prozac_ Bob Eckert JHForest at cs.com wrote: Attached is a book review I did nearly 20 years ago. I share it with you as the issues Walker Percy explored in the book under review, "The Thanatos Syndrome," seem ever more current. Timely reading. Satire with the bite of Jonathan Swift. Jim * * * The Thanatos Syndrome by Walker Percy Farrar Straus Giroux, New York 1987, 372 pp reviewed by Jim Forest Walker Percy is southern and Catholic, Kurt Vonnegut northern and secular, not minor differences, but perhaps they recognize each other as relatives. Both are inclined to use comedy, at times the slapstick variety, in order to talk about some of the unfunniest subjects in the world, like war, euthanasia, abortion, and other justifications we cook up for killing one another. Percy's hero in this book, as in his earlier novel, Love in the Ruins, is Dr. Thomas More, resident of a rural Louisiana parish (what we yankees call a county) and a direct descendent of St. Thomas More. Like his ancestor, he has been a prisoner, but for selling amphetamines to truckers rather than for acts of fideility to conscience. Also like his ancestor, he is a Catholic, except in the current generation, things being what they are, More's connection to his Church is threadbare. Still there is a bit of religious glue holding body and soul together. Tom More isn't able to make himself comfortable with the contemporary mercies that pave the way to the gas chamber and the abortorium. In The Thanatos Syndrome we encounter a few psychiatrists who makes heaps of money running the Qualitarian Center, where the old and/or feeble-minded are provided with Death with Dignity. In their spare time, using a federal grant, the clever doctors are in the midst of a local experiment that they regard as the best idea since fluoride in toothpaste. While sticking to bottled water for themselves, they are lacing the water supply with a substance (borrowed from a nearby nuclear generator) that knocks out the part of the brain that makes people dangerous and miserable. Violent crime has evaporated in the area effected. Black prisoners are singing the old spirituals as they cheerfully pick cotton on the local prison farm. Sexual-transmitted diseases have practically disappeared. No more AIDS, no more herpes. At first glance it looks like the doctors have found a chemical method to mass produce the lifestyle of the saints. People drinking the local water aren't inclined to do the sorts of things that make headlines in The National Enquirer. (But not quite. It turns out that adults who drink too much of the local water find that the ideal sex-partners are children.) The part of the brain made dormant also happens to be where the soul and conscience hang out. It is the patch that has most to do with creativity, verbal skills, and what makes us who we are. Those drinking the local water are better at telling you exactly where St. Louis is than in making a sentence that includes a subject, verb and object. They are a whiz at bridge but incapable of theology. Percy links what is now happening in manipulative medical technology in the US and what was going on with psychiatry in Germany from the twenties until the collapse of the Nazis, at the same time pointing out that you don't have to like Hitler (the German shrinks didn't) to end up doing some of the worst things that happened in Hitler's Germany. Percy integrates a steady stream of observation about the American Way of Life and what is like living in "the Age of Not Knowing What to Do." For example here is Tom More reflecting about a patient who, before the local water ironed out all depression and anxiety, felt like a failure: "What is failure? Failure is what people do ninety-nine percent of the time. Even in the movies: ninety-nine outtakes for one print. But in the movies they don't show the failures. What you see are the takes that work. So it looks as if every action, even going crazy, is carried off in a proper, rounded- off way. It looks as if real failure is unspeakable. TV has screwed up millions of people with their little rounded-off stories. Because that is not the way life is. Life is fits and starts, mostly fits." Percy continues his assessment of contemporary American Catholicism that began in Love in the Ruins. Fr. Kev Kevin, the former director of the Love Clinic, has abandoned the controls of the Orgasmatron computer and given up the priesthood as well. He is "into Hinduism," has married a former Maryknoll nun who is taking up witchcraft, and together they run a marriage encounter center in a rehabilitated stable. In The Thanatos Syndrome we meet a very different kind of priest: Fr. Simon Smith, a modern stylite, fasting atop a fire- watch tower as the book begins. People consider him crazy as a loon. Maybe he is, but he's a saint as well. His "confession" is the keystone of the novel. Here we discover that his vocation is an on-going penitential work having chiefly to do with the devastation his father helped bring about in Europe -- he is the son of one of the liberal German physicians (anti-Nazis one and all) whose work to "relieve suffering" via euthanasia helped prepare the way for the Holocaust. Father Smith's big discovery in life was that "the only people I got along with were bums, outcasts, pariahs, family skeletons, and the dying." It isn't a boast. "I don't know about Mother Theresa, but I [did what I did] because I liked it, not for love of the wretched ... dying people were the only people I could stand. They were my kind ... Dying people, suffering people, don't lie." [October 28, 1987] * * * Jim & Nancy Forest Kanisstraat 5 / 1811 GJ Alkmaar / The Netherlands tel: (country code 31)(area code 72) 511 2545 Jim's e-mail: jhforest at cs.com Nancy's e-mail: forestflier at cs.com Orthodox Peace Fellowship web site: http://www.incommunion.org Jim & Nancy Forest web site: http://incommunion.org/forest-flier/ * * * -- An archive of all list discussion is available at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy/hypermail Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy --------------------------------- Celebrate Yahoo!'s 10th Birthday! Yahoo! Netrospective: 100 Moments of the Web -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rgeckert at yahoo.com Sat Mar 5 00:50:19 2005 From: rgeckert at yahoo.com (Robert Eckert) Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2005 21:50:19 -0800 (PST) Subject: [percy-l] re The Thanatos Syndrome In-Reply-To: <1e3.3682375a.2f587cfd@cs.com> Message-ID: <20050305055019.66748.qmail@web21004.mail.yahoo.com> Jim, Peter Kramer makes some interesting observations regarding Percy's prescience _TS_ is his book _Listening to Prozac_ Bob Eckert JHForest at cs.com wrote: Attached is a book review I did nearly 20 years ago. I share it with you as the issues Walker Percy explored in the book under review, "The Thanatos Syndrome," seem ever more current. Timely reading. Satire with the bite of Jonathan Swift. Jim * * * The Thanatos Syndrome by Walker Percy Farrar Straus Giroux, New York 1987, 372 pp reviewed by Jim Forest Walker Percy is southern and Catholic, Kurt Vonnegut northern and secular, not minor differences, but perhaps they recognize each other as relatives. Both are inclined to use comedy, at times the slapstick variety, in order to talk about some of the unfunniest subjects in the world, like war, euthanasia, abortion, and other justifications we cook up for killing one another. Percy's hero in this book, as in his earlier novel, Love in the Ruins, is Dr. Thomas More, resident of a rural Louisiana parish (what we yankees call a county) and a direct descendent of St. Thomas More. Like his ancestor, he has been a prisoner, but for selling amphetamines to truckers rather than for acts of fideility to conscience. Also like his ancestor, he is a Catholic, except in the current generation, things being what they are, More's connection to his Church is threadbare. Still there is a bit of religious glue holding body and soul together. Tom More isn't able to make himself comfortable with the contemporary mercies that pave the way to the gas chamber and the abortorium. In The Thanatos Syndrome we encounter a few psychiatrists who makes heaps of money running the Qualitarian Center, where the old and/or feeble-minded are provided with Death with Dignity. In their spare time, using a federal grant, the clever doctors are in the midst of a local experiment that they regard as the best idea since fluoride in toothpaste. While sticking to bottled water for themselves, they are lacing the water supply with a substance (borrowed from a nearby nuclear generator) that knocks out the part of the brain that makes people dangerous and miserable. Violent crime has evaporated in the area effected. Black prisoners are singing the old spirituals as they cheerfully pick cotton on the local prison farm. Sexual-transmitted diseases have practically disappeared. No more AIDS, no more herpes. At first glance it looks like the doctors have found a chemical method to mass produce the lifestyle of the saints. People drinking the local water aren't inclined to do the sorts of things that make headlines in The National Enquirer. (But not quite. It turns out that adults who drink too much of the local water find that the ideal sex-partners are children.) The part of the brain made dormant also happens to be where the soul and conscience hang out. It is the patch that has most to do with creativity, verbal skills, and what makes us who we are. Those drinking the local water are better at telling you exactly where St. Louis is than in making a sentence that includes a subject, verb and object. They are a whiz at bridge but incapable of theology. Percy links what is now happening in manipulative medical technology in the US and what was going on with psychiatry in Germany from the twenties until the collapse of the Nazis, at the same time pointing out that you don't have to like Hitler (the German shrinks didn't) to end up doing some of the worst things that happened in Hitler's Germany. Percy integrates a steady stream of observation about the American Way of Life and what is like living in "the Age of Not Knowing What to Do." For example here is Tom More reflecting about a patient who, before the local water ironed out all depression and anxiety, felt like a failure: "What is failure? Failure is what people do ninety-nine percent of the time. Even in the movies: ninety-nine outtakes for one print. But in the movies they don't show the failures. What you see are the takes that work. So it looks as if every action, even going crazy, is carried off in a proper, rounded- off way. It looks as if real failure is unspeakable. TV has screwed up millions of people with their little rounded-off stories. Because that is not the way life is. Life is fits and starts, mostly fits." Percy continues his assessment of contemporary American Catholicism that began in Love in the Ruins. Fr. Kev Kevin, the former director of the Love Clinic, has abandoned the controls of the Orgasmatron computer and given up the priesthood as well. He is "into Hinduism," has married a former Maryknoll nun who is taking up witchcraft, and together they run a marriage encounter center in a rehabilitated stable. In The Thanatos Syndrome we meet a very different kind of priest: Fr. Simon Smith, a modern stylite, fasting atop a fire- watch tower as the book begins. People consider him crazy as a loon. Maybe he is, but he's a saint as well. His "confession" is the keystone of the novel. Here we discover that his vocation is an on-going penitential work having chiefly to do with the devastation his father helped bring about in Europe -- he is the son of one of the liberal German physicians (anti-Nazis one and all) whose work to "relieve suffering" via euthanasia helped prepare the way for the Holocaust. Father Smith's big discovery in life was that "the only people I got along with were bums, outcasts, pariahs, family skeletons, and the dying." It isn't a boast. "I don't know about Mother Theresa, but I [did what I did] because I liked it, not for love of the wretched ... dying people were the only people I could stand. They were my kind ... Dying people, suffering people, don't lie." [October 28, 1987] * * * Jim & Nancy Forest Kanisstraat 5 / 1811 GJ Alkmaar / The Netherlands tel: (country code 31)(area code 72) 511 2545 Jim's e-mail: jhforest at cs.com Nancy's e-mail: forestflier at cs.com Orthodox Peace Fellowship web site: http://www.incommunion.org Jim & Nancy Forest web site: http://incommunion.org/forest-flier/ * * * -- An archive of all list discussion is available at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy/hypermail Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy --------------------------------- Celebrate Yahoo!'s 10th Birthday! Yahoo! Netrospective: 100 Moments of the Web -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Nikkibar at aol.com Mon Mar 7 15:28:04 2005 From: Nikkibar at aol.com (Nikkibar at aol.com) Date: Mon, 7 Mar 2005 15:28:04 EST Subject: [percy-l] a question re The Thanatos Syndrome Message-ID: <89.2243fe54.2f5e1354@aol.com> Good point. History was on Freud's side when he defined this death urge in Civilization and it's Discontents and history since has not exactly proven him wrong if the reports from Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur are to be compared to the two world wars. Nikki Barranger -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Nikkibar at aol.com Mon Mar 7 15:31:34 2005 From: Nikkibar at aol.com (Nikkibar at aol.com) Date: Mon, 7 Mar 2005 15:31:34 EST Subject: [percy-l] re The Thanatos Syndrome Message-ID: <1ef.373b2de6.2f5e1426@aol.com> There is an interesting study on Walker and Pearce in Explorations of the Twentieth Century (VOL X) just published by Southwestern University at Lafayette. I discovered it quite by accident because I have a poem in the same volume. Worth looking up in your nearest college library Nikki Barranger -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From wriddick at usa.net Mon Mar 7 18:11:36 2005 From: wriddick at usa.net (Wade Riddick) Date: Mon, 7 Mar 2005 17:11:36 -0600 Subject: [percy-l] a question re The Thanatos Syndrome In-Reply-To: <89.2243fe54.2f5e1354@aol.com> Message-ID: A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 711 bytes Desc: not available URL: From armstron at ohiou.edu Wed Mar 9 16:22:18 2005 From: armstron at ohiou.edu (Ken Armstrong) Date: Wed, 09 Mar 2005 16:22:18 -0500 Subject: [percy-l] a question re The Thanatos Syndrome In-Reply-To: References: <89.2243fe54.2f5e1354@aol.com> Message-ID: <5.2.0.9.2.20050309161719.020e71f8@oak.cats.ohiou.edu> At 05:11 PM 3/7/2005 -0600, you wrote: >>Good point. History was on Freud's side when he defined this death urge >>in Civilization and it's Discontents and history since has not exactly >>proven him wrong if the reports from Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur are to be >>compared to the two world wars. > >Not to put a pin in anybody's bubble, but war claims a far smaller >percentage of the civilian population now than it did ten thousand years >ago - just 1500 years ago in some parts of the Americas. If modern >civilization has a destructive urge, it's certainly not as great it was >for the "uncivilized." Wade, I'd like to think your statement is true, but when I think of Lenin and Stalin, of millions of Jews and Poles, of Pol Pot and Kmer Rouge --- it gets doubtful. The instinct for destruction of the other does not seem to have abated. Ken A. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From wriddick at usa.net Thu Mar 10 18:52:43 2005 From: wriddick at usa.net (Wade Riddick) Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 17:52:43 -0600 Subject: [percy-l] a question re The Thanatos Syndrome In-Reply-To: <5.2.0.9.2.20050309161719.020e71f8@oak.cats.ohiou.edu> References: <89.2243fe54.2f5e1354@aol.com> Message-ID: A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 1379 bytes Desc: not available URL: From wpercy2 at ibiblio.org Sat Mar 26 11:29:30 2005 From: wpercy2 at ibiblio.org (Henry P. Mills) Date: Sat, 26 Mar 2005 10:29:30 -0600 Subject: [percy-l] Percy and Palahniuk (forwarded for Gregory Plemmons) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > From: "Plemmons, Gregory" > Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2005 08:23:24 -0600 > To: > Subject: Percy and Palahniuk > > > > I seem to remember a thread on this list a few years ago on Percy and the > movie Fight Club which I've still yet to see. But I just finished the author's > latest book Choke (Chuck Palahniuk). The narrator frequently visits his > deranged mother in the psych ward, and I found some of her rantings to be > remarkably similar to Percy's protagonists: > > "...People had been working for years to make the world a safe, organized > place. Nobody realized how boring it would become...Nobody had left much room > for adventure, except maybe the kind you could buy. On a roller coaster. At a > movie. Still, it would always be that kind of faux excitement...And because > there's no possibility of real disaster, real risk, we're left with no chance > for real salvation..." > > "...Attention please, would Dr. Freud please pick up the white courtesy > telephone. A world of symbols, not the real world." > > Has anybody else noted Percy's influence or read anything about Palahniuk? > Interestingly, the narrator in Choke also dropped out of medical school after > the first year. Just wondering on this Good Friday (which just happens to land > on Flannery O'Connor's birthday). > > > Gregory Plemmons > Nashville, TN > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: "Plemmons, Gregory" Subject: Percy and Palahniuk Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2005 08:23:24 -0600 Size: 4602 URL: From dabeck at iupui.edu Sun Mar 27 16:50:08 2005 From: dabeck at iupui.edu (David Alan Beck) Date: Sun, 27 Mar 2005 16:50:08 -0500 (EST) Subject: [percy-l] Percy and Palahniuk (forwarded for Gregory Plemmons) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I teach Fight Club along with Lancelot. Students really like both. They explore similar themes but in different ways (that sounds cryptic, but I only have a minute). Both have protagonists dislike contemporary America and have visions of what it should be. FC gives us a more nihilistic approach and L. gives some reason (however slight it might be) for hope (certainly hope for the priest). (Also, _Choke_ isn't his latest. He has had a few since FC (Diary, Lullaby, and Haunted comes out in May). I thought Choke read like FC, with sex replacing violence. I do think that you are correct in seeing a connection. I'm not sure if CP ever read Percy but he has read some of the existentialists. You can find a website (a writer's cult or something like that) that has everything Chuck. He's endorsed the site as "official." It has more than anything someone would want to know about him. Any thoughts? -David On Sat, 26 Mar 2005, Henry P. Mills wrote: [NON-Text Body part not included] David Beck