[percy-l] quote source

Henry Mills wppdirector at gmail.com
Wed May 27 20:54:08 EDT 2015


Here is a quote I have set aside as a Percy favorite.  Perhaps it sheds 
some light? I can't say exactly where I transcribed it from sometime in 
the past, but I believe one of Percy's interviews.

"My theory is that the purpose of art is to transmit universal truths of 
a sort, but of a particular sort, that in art, whether it's poetry, 
fiction or painting, you are telling the reader or the listener or the 
viewer something he already knows but which he doesn't quite know that 
he knows, so that in the action of communication he experiences a 
recognition, a feeling that he has been there before, a shock of 
recognition. And so what the artist does, or tries to do, is simply to 
validate the human experience and to tell people the deep human truths 
which they already unconsciously know."

Cheers,
Henry


On 5/27/15 5:25 PM, Karl M. Terrell wrote:
> Quote-accuracy aside, this an interesting idea from both Percy and
> O¹Connor, and reminds me of an observation I once heard or read, somewhere
> ‹ my spin of which is: One sign of a capable mind, or of at least a
> careful mind, is the ability to distinguish the things you don¹t know.
> Far too many fail to understand this, and get themselves in all kinds of
> trouble.
>
> Percy and O¹Connor, though, speak to a higher ambition ‹ the undertaking
> of a search to identify the things we know, but as to which ‹ while stuck
> in our everydayness ‹ we didn¹t realize we knew, or were perhaps unable to
> know.
>
> Karl
>
> On 5/27/15, 4:41 PM, "Skip Collins" <skip.collins at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>> "Fiction doesn¹t tell us something we don¹t know, it tells us
>>> something we know but don¹t know that we know."
>> As with many pithy quotes found on the internet, I believe that this
>> is a paraphrase. I suspect the original source is what Percy said in
>> his interview with Zoltan Abadi-Nagy, which has been edited to be more
>> quotable.
>>
>> Another famous quote that I came across, attributed to Flannery
>> O'Connor, seems like it might have influenced Percy's thinking:
>> "I write to discover what I know."
>>
>> This is supposedly from The Habit of Being, a collection of O'Connor's
>> letters that Percy must have read. But when I went on Amazon to find
>> the quote, it did not show up in the search. It too appears to be a
>> cleaned up version of a less quotable passage from a letter she wrote
>> in 1948:
>> "I don't have my novel outlined and I have to write to discover what I
>> am doing. Like the old lady, I don't know so well what I think until I
>> see what I say; then I have to say it over again."
>>
>> This is more about her process of writing than some general theory of
>> coming to discover what she already knows through writing.
>>
>> I would love to be proven wrong about both the Percy and O'Connor quotes.
>>
>> -- 
>> skip
>> * Percy-L Discussion Archives: http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/percy-l/
>>
>> * Manage Your Membership:
>> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/percy-l
>>
>> * Contact the Moderator: percy-l-owner (at) lists.ibiblio.org
>>
>> * Visit The Walker Percy Project: http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy
> * Percy-L Discussion Archives: http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/percy-l/
>
> * Manage Your Membership: http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/percy-l
>
> * Contact the Moderator: percy-l-owner (at) lists.ibiblio.org
>
> * Visit The Walker Percy Project: http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy
>
>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/percy-l/attachments/20150527/59ef8e4f/attachment.html>


More information about the Percy-L mailing list