From jhforest at gmail.com Wed Jan 2 15:34:28 2019 From: jhforest at gmail.com (Jim Forest) Date: Wed, 2 Jan 2019 21:34:28 +0100 Subject: [percy-l] =?utf-8?q?We_Still_Live_Within_the_Mediated=2C_Alienat?= =?utf-8?q?ed_World_of_=E2=80=9CThe_Moviegoer=E2=80=9D?= Message-ID: www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/we-still-live-within-the-mediated-alienated-world-of-the-moviegoer *We Still Live Within the Mediated, Alienated World of ?The Moviegoer?* By Paul Elie The New Yorker / 2 January 2019 Walker Percy?s novel, from 1961, may be the first work of what we call contemporary American fiction.Photograph from AP That it isn?t really about movies is the first surprise. Binx Bolling, the novel?s main character, is only an occasional moviegoer, both by the standards of postwar America (when Martin Scorsese would see a movie a day) and those of the present, when many of us spend most of our time looking at one screen or another. ?The Moviegoer? isn?t really about movies, and yet the title remains unexpectedly apt, just as it was when the novel, published in 1961, became a surprise winner of the National Book Award and made a sudden Southern eminence of its author, Walker Percy, a nonpracticing physician and self-taught philosopher in early middle age. It?s apt because it moves the novel (and our expectations for the novel) out of the South. It intimates that this novel, set in New Orleans, the region?s most storied city, isn?t about history or legacy, isn?t about place at all: it?s about how we see things?a novel of perception and sensibility, dealing with the search for authenticity in a scripted, stylized, mediated world. Percy?s contemporary Flannery O?Connor characterized the literature of the American South at midcentury as set against the typical. In O?Connor?s view, there was no typical Southern novel, and that was a good thing; for her, the best Southern novel was atypical just as life in the South (in her time, as she saw it) was atypical of American life as a whole. The Southern novel she celebrated takes unusual, extreme, even grotesque, behavior as its starting point. Such a novel is rooted, she explained, in ?some experience which we are not accustomed to observe every day, or which the ordinary man may never experience in his ordinary life. . . . Yet the characters have an inner coherence, if not always a coherence to their social framework. Their fictional qualities lean away from typical social patterns, toward mystery and the unexpected.? ?As I Lay Dying,? and ?Wise Blood,? and later ?A Confederacy of Dunces? and ?The Color Purple? and ?Fishboy?: these novels are fiercely atypical. But the originality of ?The Moviegoer? is more paradoxical than theirs. Unlike the novels of the South that have something of the heightened quality that came to be called gothic, ?The Moviegoer? becomes atypical through its scrutiny of the typical. It takes ordinary experience??everydayness,? Binx calls it?and makes it the subject of fitful philosophical inquiry. It promises a typical moviegoer but delivers the inimitable Binx. It calls literary categories to mind by leaning away from them. ?The Moviegoer? makes scant reference to the Civil War, to racial conflict, to old houses and barrel-aged whiskey and the notion of the South as a place where people sit around telling tall tales on front porches, whose ?tragic? history somehow binds them together. It?s a novel of New Orleans where the protagonist winds up missing Mardi Gras for a stockbrokers? convention in Chicago. It?s a Catholic novel (the main action takes place in the days before Ash Wednesday), and yet one whose protagonist considers himself not much of a Catholic at all, but a skeptic whose ?unbelief was invincible from the beginning??who tells us, ?I have only to hear the word God and a curtain comes down in my head.? It?s a distinctly American novel, but one that stands apart from the main line from Hawthorne to Twain to James and Wharton and then to Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Cather?the double helix of innocents at home and innocents abroad. Its key antecedents are the European existentialists Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Camus?the latter two of whom were also important for Ralph Ellison, who drew inspiration from them a decade before Percy, in writing ?Invisible Man.? It?s a novel of the search??the pilgrim?s search outside himself, rather than the guru?s search within,? Percy liked to say?but without the usual signposting. There?s no journey to a strange culture, no savvy guide, no sloughing off of one self and the taking on of another; no raft and river, no feasting or fasting, no new world at the end of the journey. There?s just the ?everydayness? of Binx?s life in New Orleans and the slight diversion of an overnight train ride. It?s a coming-of-age novel, but one whose protagonist is nearly twice the age of Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield. Binx is about to turn thirty, an age by which American men of midcentury were expected to have settled into their adult lives. He is a college graduate, a veteran, a stocks-and-bonds broker?and yet his self is ?left over,? as Percy put it in an essay. Nearing thirty, Binx is gripped by ?the possibility of the search? as if for the first time. The novel was a surprise even to its author. As he wrote it, Percy, like Binx, was forced out of himself and compelled to court, as O?Connor wrote, ?mystery and the unexpected? as never before. In outline, Percy?s early life was more atypical than that of any character he created. He was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1916, the eldest of three sons in a prosperous family of planters, lawyers, and politicians. When Percy was thirteen, his father committed suicide (as his father had done before him). Two years later, his mother died in a car accident that was thought by some to have been an act of self-harm. Percy and his brothers, LeRoy and Phinizy, had gone to Greenville, Mississippi, to live with his father?s cousin, William Alexander Percy, and there Walker Percy fell under the spell of this Southern man of the manor, whom he and his brothers called Uncle Will. Educated at Sewanee and Harvard Law School, a veteran of the Great War, a bachelor, religiously inclined, Uncle Will ran the plantation, presided over the civic life of Greenville, wrote poetry, exulted in orchestral music and opera, and served, Percy recalled, as ?something of a spokesman for the South.? And he raised the three orphaned Percys in the spirit of the questions he liked to pose: ?What do you love? What do you live by?? In part to get out of the great man?s shadow, Percy went north and east: to the University of North Carolina (where he was a steady moviegoer) and then to Columbia University?s medical school, in upper Manhattan. Drawn to the study of the causes of disease more than to the care of patients, he followed a course in medical pathology. As the Second World War began, he interned at Bellevue Hospital, notorious as the place where the city?s destitute were tended to?and there he contracted tuberculosis. At sanatoriums in Connecticut and upstate New York, he followed the regimen of rest and fresh air that was the nearest thing to a cure for the disease. As his TB went into remission, he began to imagine that he could pursue a career as a writer rather than as a medical doctor. ?I was in bed so much, alone so much, that I had nothing to do but read and think,? he recalled. ?I began to question everything I had once believed.? Reading Thomas Mann, Sartre, and Kierkegaard, Percy came to see the novelist as a diagnostician and the novel?the philosophical novel?as a tool with which to probe the pathology of the modern world. Religion became another instrument. Out of the sanatorium, prompted by conversations with a Catholic fellow-convalescent and recently made aware (through William Alexander Percy?s late-in-life autobiography, ?Lanterns on the Levee?) of Uncle Will?s strong attraction to Catholicism, Percy himself was drawn to the church. He had fallen in love with a nurse he knew in New Orleans, Mary Bernice Townsend, and they were married in a Baptist church; and then he and Bunt, as she was called, converted to Catholicism and settled in Louisiana, first in New Orleans and then in the burgeoning suburb of Covington, across Lake Pontchartrain. Why the turn to religion? The reason, Percy later said, was that he saw Catholicism as true, and its truths as standards by which to measure and assess the problems he saw with life in the twentieth century. Ten years passed. Percy and Bunt adopted a baby girl, and Bunt gave birth to another girl. Percy, living on inheritances, worked at being a writer. He wrote two novels, each a Southern bildungsroman: ?one a bad imitation of Thomas Mann,? he later said, ?the other a worse imitation of Thomas Wolfe?which is very bad indeed.? Inspired by the postwar philosophers Gabriel Marcel (a French Catholic) and Susanne K. Langer, he began to write philosophical essays, using them to puzzle out quandaries of everyday life?such as those of the businessman-commuter in the essay he called ?The Man on the Train.? The essays, strong and strange, were published in quarterlies of literature and philosophy, and few people read them. The Percys? younger daughter, Ann, was deaf, and they placed her in a day school for students with hearing impairments in New Orleans. Percy bought a small house nearby, in the Uptown district, where he spent time during the school day. There, away from his library, his immediate family, his history, his personal story of death and loss, disease and rejuvenation, he came up with the character of John Bickerson Bolling and a loose narrative he called ?Confessions of a Movie-Goer.? A literary agent sent the manuscript to a junior editor in New York, Stanley Kauffmann, who was also the movie critic for The New Republic. Kauffmann abbreviated the title and edited the text thoroughly?sharpening the quick cuts, juxtapositions, non sequiturs, and sudden shifts of topic and tonal register that give Binx?s narration, and the novel, its distinctive style. Published in 1961, lightly publicized, little noticed, ?The Moviegoer? found its way to A. J. Liebling, The New Yorker writer, who had written a biography of the Louisiana governor Earl Long and was steeped in the culture and flavor of New Orleans. Liebling shared the novel with his wife, the novelist Jean Stafford, who was a judge for the National Book Awards that year, and the novel, not formally nominated, was put up for consideration. It was a strong year for American fiction: J. D. Salinger?s ?Franny and Zooey,? Joseph Heller?s ?Catch-22,? William Maxwell?s ?The Ch?teau,? and Isaac Bashevis Singer?s ?The Spinoza of Market Street? were all nominated. The award went to ?The Moviegoer.? Percy, accepting the prize in New York, framed the novel in terms he had explored in his essays (and which he would develop for the rest of his career): the sickness of modern Western society, the loss of the sense of the self, the role of the writer as diagnostician. Concluding, he made his most vital point indirectly: ?In short, the book attempts a modest restatement of the Judeo-Christian notion that man is more than an organism in an environment, more than an integrated personality, more even than a mature and creative individual, as the phrase goes. He is a wayfarer and a pilgrim.? Percy was a late starter as a novelist, and Binx Bolling is late coming of age, but Percy?s novel of Binx?s coming of age was ahead of its time. With its slack and offhand protagonist, its present-tense narration, its effortless mix of informal speech, images from popular culture, and frank ruminations on the meaning of life, ?The Moviegoer? is, in my estimation, the first work of what we call contemporary American fiction, the earliest novel to render a set of circumstances and an outlook that still feel recognizably ours. Faulkner once characterized his approach to writing as ?oratory out of solitude.? Of this approach Percy made a new thing altogether. The solitude of ?The Moviegoer? isn?t the solitude of a rebel or an independent, but that of a person who is alone in a crowd?in a movie theatre or on a sidewalk in the French Quarter. The oratory in the book isn?t that of the Bible or of Stoic philosophy or of a Russian novel but of a voice-over?the present-tense monologue of the person who does not tell a story so much as self-consciously offer a running commentary on life as it passes before his eyes. The present tense of the narration has acted as a preservative in the novel. The manners and everyday details, so closely observed, are noticeably those of another time. Businessmen (no longer called that) no longer wear hats to the office, and their come-ons to their female subordinates are understood as coercive and manipulative, not perks of the job; the ?silent reproaches? Binx discerns from his secretaries are said aloud. African-Americans are no longer confined to the back of the bus or prized patronizingly for their ?devotion? to white people who employ them; Jewish people are no longer reflexively regarded as figures of displacement and exile. Cinemas are no longer called movie houses, and their managers no longer stand under the marquee offering passersby a ?sample look? on a slow night. The trim certainties of the ?Baltimore Catechism? (the stuff of the novel?s epilogue) are now unknown to even the devoutest Catholic child. And yet for all that, ?The Moviegoer? seems to describe the way we live now, for its affectless protagonist observes a society whose every aspect seems mediated, contrived, statistically anticipated, manipulated in advance, so that direct experience of life can seem as elusive as the experience of God. Don DeLillo, a novelist of a generation younger than Walker Percy, spoke of the qualities of the novels that emboldened him to write fiction, and fiction of a particular kind. ?There?s a drive and a daring that go beyond technical invention,? he said. ?I think it?s right to call it a life-drive even though these books deal at times very directly with death. No optimism, no pessimism. No homesickness for lost values or for the way fiction used to be written. These books open out onto some larger mystery.? Southern, Catholic, ironic, oblique: ?The Moviegoer? doesn?t add up, quite. What is it about? What has come of Binx?s search? What has prompted him to settle down with Kate and embrace everydayness with quasi-religious devotion? ?It is impossible to say,? Binx remarks in the last line of the novel proper. It is impossible to say. And yet ?The Moviegoer,? like its central character, has an inner coherence. Its take on everydayness has the quality of wonder that is the novel?s true subject. It opens out onto some larger mystery, one that we, no less than he, are still trying to solve. * * * *Paul Elie, a senior fellow at Georgetown University, is the author of ?The Life You Save May Be Your Own??a group portrait of Walker Percy, Flannery O?Connor, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day?and ?Reinventing Bach.?* * * * -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lauren.stacy.berdy at gmail.com Sat Jan 12 08:35:29 2019 From: lauren.stacy.berdy at gmail.com (Lauren Berdy) Date: Sat, 12 Jan 2019 08:35:29 -0500 Subject: [percy-l] =?utf-8?q?Here=E2=80=99s_to_Unsuicide=3A_An_Interview_?= =?utf-8?q?with_Richard_Powers_-_Los_Angeles_Review_of_Books?= Message-ID: <96A1BA8F-ECA9-4ECD-9400-F775E0B23EE7@gmail.com> Of what use is the writer or poet unless he attains a new vision of life? It is precisely why we read Dr Percy the innovator who helps to form the great chain of creative literature. He didn?t sit comfortably down in the ruins and piece together shards. Richard Powers too speaks to our human horizon and predicament and brings in Dr Percy to show how humans must ?hold the gain? in their cultivated souls. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/heres-to-unsuicide-an-interview-with-richard-powers/ Sent from my iPad From wppdirector at gmail.com Tue Jan 15 04:54:38 2019 From: wppdirector at gmail.com (Henry P. Mills) Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2019 04:54:38 -0500 Subject: [percy-l] =?utf-8?q?Here=E2=80=99s_to_Unsuicide=3A_An_Interview_?= =?utf-8?q?with_Richard_Powers_-_Los_Angeles_Review_of_Books?= In-Reply-To: <96A1BA8F-ECA9-4ECD-9400-F775E0B23EE7@gmail.com> References: <96A1BA8F-ECA9-4ECD-9400-F775E0B23EE7@gmail.com> Message-ID: <5130AD29-41F5-45C9-9075-5D346B6D7C16@gmail.com> Fascinating interview, Lauren. Thanks for sharing. Reminds me a bit of Albert Schweitzer?s driving philosophy of developing ?reverence for life? - that is, reverence for all creation in the universe, from our fellow human beings to nature itself. I don?t know Powers? spiritual or religious background, and those given his affinity for Percy. Anyone care to chime in about Powers? > On Jan 12, 2019, at 8:35 AM, Lauren Berdy wrote: > > Of what use is the writer or poet unless he attains a new vision of life? > It is precisely why we read Dr Percy the innovator who helps to form the great chain of creative literature. He didn?t sit comfortably down in the ruins and piece together shards. Richard Powers too speaks to our human horizon and predicament and brings in > Dr Percy to show how humans must ?hold the gain? in their cultivated souls. > > > > https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/heres-to-unsuicide-an-interview-with-richard-powers/ > > > Sent from my iPad > From honeyjbc at gmail.com Tue Jan 15 22:19:26 2019 From: honeyjbc at gmail.com (honeyjbc1) Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2019 22:19:26 -0500 Subject: [percy-l] =?utf-8?q?Watch_Lesson_Three_for_=E2=80=9CIntroduction?= =?utf-8?q?_to_the_Constitution=E2=80=9D?= In-Reply-To: <1363044904.210642.1547608533617@mail.yahoo.com> References: <1547578770989.34514def-b25d-4a92-8fdc-c9a09d34c59d@hs.hillsdale.edu> <1832592031.233888.1547607615751@mail.yahoo.com> <1363044904.210642.1547608533617@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: A comment on the article about animals and people. Hillsdale President asks the question what's the difference between children and dogs. Janet Cantor ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: janetcantor37 at yahoo.com Date: Tue, Jan 15, 2019, 10:15 PM Subject: Watch Lesson Three for ?Introduction to the Constitution? To: janet cantor ?The Declaration of Independence?All Men Are Created Equal? [image: Introduction to the Constitution] Watch Lesson Three ?The Declaration of Independence?All Men Are Created Equal? [image: Lecture Three] -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From honeyjbc at gmail.com Tue Jan 15 22:25:59 2019 From: honeyjbc at gmail.com (honeyjbc1) Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2019 22:25:59 -0500 Subject: [percy-l] =?utf-8?q?A_comment_on__Here=E2=80=99s_to_Unsuicide=3A?= =?utf-8?q?_An_Interview_with_Richard_Powers_-_Los_Angeles_Review_o?= =?utf-8?q?f_Books?= Message-ID: This may be a repeat. I had trouble sending this earlier. I hope it works now. *From: **janetcantor37 at yahoo.com* *Date: Jan 15, 2019 5:38 PM* *Subject: [percy-l] Here?s to Unsuicide: An Interview with Richard Powers - Los Angeles Review of Books* *To: janet cantor <**honeyjbc at gmail.com* *>* *Uh oh.* *A dissenter.* * I love animals, trees, all of G-d's creations.* * But I look at our story.* * It's all there in the Bible.* *In six days and in a very specific order G-d created it all.* *The trees and animals were here when at last G-d created man.* *It was all there for us. We were to be those closest to the top.* * And I see no reason to believe Percy would want to change the order of Dominion as G-d designed it all.* *I respect and stand in awe of the Redwoods and certainly would never want man to exploit them into extinction.* *Balance in nature as in all things matters and man with his brain and experience has always to be mindful of balance in all things.* * But I am not ready to put myself second to birds trees or even gorillas.* * Ergo I dissent from the main idea of this beautifully written article.* * G-d did not create a perfect universe. He obviously wanted us to sort through and deal with the chaos.* *Janet Cantor* * From: "Henry P. Mills" <**wppdirector at gmail.com* *>* * Date: Jan 15, 2019 4:54 AM* * Subject: Re: [percy-l] Here?s to Unsuicide: An Interview with Richard Powers - Los Angeles Review of Books* * To: Percy-L <**percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org* *>* * Fascinating interview, Lauren. Thanks for sharing. Reminds me a bit of Albert Schweitzer?s driving philosophy of developing ?reverence for life? - that is, reverence for all creation in the universe, from our fellow human beings to nature itself. I don?t know Powers? spiritual or religious background, and those given his affinity for Percy. Anyone care to chime in about Powers?* * On Jan 12, 2019, at 8:35 AM, Lauren Berdy **lauren.stacy.berdy at gmail.com* *> wrote:* * Of what use is the writer or poet unless he attains a new vision of life? It is precisely why we read Dr Percy the innovator who helps to form the great chain of creative literature. He didn?t sit comfortably down in the ruins and piece together shards. Richard Powers too speaks to our human horizon and predicament and brings in* * Dr Percy to show how humans must ?hold the gain? in their cultivated souls. * *https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/heres-to-unsuicide-an-interview-with-richard-powers/* -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From wppdirector at gmail.com Wed Jan 16 00:08:29 2019 From: wppdirector at gmail.com (Henry P. Mills) Date: Wed, 16 Jan 2019 00:08:29 -0500 Subject: [percy-l] =?utf-8?q?A_comment_on__Here=E2=80=99s_to_Unsuicide=3A?= =?utf-8?q?_An_Interview_with_Richard_Powers_-_Los_Angeles_Review_of_Books?= In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <949F046D-84AF-48D0-A93A-0B93189E6733@gmail.com> Janet (et al), I believe your previous two posts, by no fault of your own, were distributed in reverse order. The video you suggest entitled "[percy-l] Watch Lesson Three for ?Introduction to the Constitutio n? should have appeared AFTER your below comments. And of course, *dissent* in the spirit of civil and good debate is always welcome! Best, Henry Mills Percy-L Administrator ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: honeyjbc1 > Uh oh. A dissenter. I love animals, trees, all of G-d's creations. But I look at our story. It's all there in the Bible. In six days and in a very specific order G-d created it all. The trees and animals were here when at last G-d created man. It was all there for us. We were to be those closest to the top. And I see no reason to believe Percy would want to change the order of Dominion as G-d designed it all. I respect and stand in awe of the Redwoods and certainly would never want man to exploit them into extinction. Balance in nature as in all things matters and man with his brain and experience has always to be mindful of balance in all things. But I am not ready to put myself second to birds trees or even gorillas. Ergo I dissent from the main idea of this beautifully written article. G-d did not create a perfect universe. He obviously wanted us to sort through and deal with the chaos. Janet Cantor > On Jan 15, 2019, at 10:25 PM, honeyjbc1 wrote: > > This may be a repeat. I had trouble sending this earlier. I hope it works now. > > > > > From: "Henry P. Mills" > > Date: Jan 15, 2019 4:54 AM > Subject: Re: [percy-l] Here?s to Unsuicide: An Interview with Richard Powers - Los Angeles Review of Books > To: Percy-L > > > Fascinating interview, Lauren. Thanks for sharing. Reminds me a bit of Albert Schweitzer?s driving philosophy of developing ?reverence for life? - that is, reverence for all creation in the universe, from our fellow human beings to nature itself. I don?t know Powers? spiritual or religious background, and those given his affinity for Percy. Anyone care to chime in about Powers? > > On Jan 12, 2019, at 8:35 AM, Lauren Berdy lauren.stacy.berdy at gmail.com > wrote: > Of what use is the writer or poet unless he attains a new vision of life? It is precisely why we read Dr Percy the innovator who helps to form the great chain of creative literature. He didn?t sit comfortably down in the ruins and piece together shards. Richard Powers too speaks to our human horizon and predicament and brings in > Dr Percy to show how humans must ?hold the gain? in their cultivated souls. > https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/heres-to-unsuicide-an-interview-with-richard-powers/ > > * 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: From jp at jlarsp.com Wed Jan 16 15:05:45 2019 From: jp at jlarsp.com (John Pearson) Date: Wed, 16 Jan 2019 14:05:45 -0600 Subject: [percy-l] =?utf-8?q?Here=E2=80=99s_to_Unsuicide=3A_An_Interview_?= =?utf-8?q?with_Richard_Powers_-_Los_Angeles_Review_of_Books?= In-Reply-To: <5130AD29-41F5-45C9-9075-5D346B6D7C16@gmail.com> References: <96A1BA8F-ECA9-4ECD-9400-F775E0B23EE7@gmail.com> <5130AD29-41F5-45C9-9075-5D346B6D7C16@gmail.com> Message-ID: <38F10510-204E-439F-A1C1-846BFE81275E@jlarsp.com> I read the interview with great interest, as Percy and Powers are among the small handful of writers who have most influenced me. I?ve read pretty much all that both have published, and I discovered Powers not that long after Percy had died, so in a way reading them has constituted different eras in my life. Both novelists are interested in our human predicament and in exploring how to find our way out of or through it towards a reverence for all life, as both Henry and Lauren say. Both novelists are on a search, through their characters, for meaning and purpose in our lives. I?ve read numerous interviews with Powers and unlike Percy, he does not seem to have a religious background, or at least he has been private about that part of his life. He is from the Chicago area, and lived from about age 11 to 16 in Bangkok when his father worked at an International School. There are some similarities to Percy?s biography and breadth of interests. While Percy studied to be a physician before becoming a novelist, Powers started out studying physics before turning to writing fiction. His broad interests have made it into his novels where he has explored artificial intelligence, genetics, and computer science as well as medicine and music. He won a MacArthur Fellowship in the late ?80s. I was first turned on to him in the early ?90s. A friend of mine who went to the University of Illinois?where Powers had also gone?told of one of his English professors talking about Powers, who had previously been his student. The professor predicted that Powers would one day win the Nobel Prize. Since Percy died, Powers is the novelist whose new work I anticipate and seek out with the greatest eagerness. (After reading this interview, I want to read Kim Stanley Robinson and Lydia Millet). The interview here focuses mainly on his newest novel, The Overstory, which is also perhaps his most ambitious and epic book. It is well worth the effort, and if any reader were looking for a less daunting place to start, I would say The Echo Maker, his 2006 National Book Award winner. In some ways it may be his most Percian novel, in its exploration of epistemology and our search to find our place in the universe. It may be my favorite novel, or perhaps right near the top with Percy?s The Second Coming. John Pearson Wheaton, IL > On Jan 15, 2019, at 3:54 AM, Henry P. Mills wrote: > > Fascinating interview, Lauren. Thanks for sharing. Reminds me a bit of Albert Schweitzer?s driving philosophy of developing ?reverence for life? - that is, reverence for all creation in the universe, from our fellow human beings to nature itself. I don?t know Powers? spiritual or religious background, and those given his affinity for Percy. Anyone care to chime in about Powers? > >> On Jan 12, 2019, at 8:35 AM, Lauren Berdy wrote: >> >> Of what use is the writer or poet unless he attains a new vision of life? >> It is precisely why we read Dr Percy the innovator who helps to form the great chain of creative literature. He didn?t sit comfortably down in the ruins and piece together shards. Richard Powers too speaks to our human horizon and predicament and brings in >> Dr Percy to show how humans must ?hold the gain? in their cultivated souls. >> >> >> >> https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/heres-to-unsuicide-an-interview-with-richard-powers/ >> >> >> Sent from my iPad >> > > * 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: From lauren.stacy.berdy at gmail.com Thu Jan 17 13:28:07 2019 From: lauren.stacy.berdy at gmail.com (Lauren Berdy) Date: Thu, 17 Jan 2019 13:28:07 -0500 Subject: [percy-l] =?utf-8?q?Here=E2=80=99s_to_Unsuicide=3A_An_Interview_?= =?utf-8?q?with_Richard_Powers_-_Los_Angeles_Review_of_Books?= In-Reply-To: <38F10510-204E-439F-A1C1-846BFE81275E@jlarsp.com> References: <96A1BA8F-ECA9-4ECD-9400-F775E0B23EE7@gmail.com> <5130AD29-41F5-45C9-9075-5D346B6D7C16@gmail.com> <38F10510-204E-439F-A1C1-846BFE81275E@jlarsp.com> Message-ID: Both Dr. Percy and Mr. Powers have an overwhelming engagement in the physical world.Perhaps through it the elusive spiritual? "Indicating a path between reality and the soul", Whitman says somewhere. "Strength poured like oil into his muscles and he ran with great joyous ten foot antelope bounds. The Edsel waited for him. The last Gentleman,1966, On Wed, Jan 16, 2019 at 3:18 PM John Pearson wrote: > I read the interview with great interest, as Percy and Powers are among > the small handful of writers who have most influenced me. I?ve read pretty > much all that both have published, and I discovered Powers not that long > after Percy had died, so in a way reading them has constituted different > eras in my life. Both novelists are interested in our human predicament and > in exploring how to find our way out of or through it towards a reverence > for all life, as both Henry and Lauren say. > > Both novelists are on a search, through their characters, for > meaning and purpose in our lives. I?ve read numerous interviews with Powers > and unlike Percy, he does not seem to have a religious background, or at > least he has been private about that part of his life. He is from the > Chicago area, and lived from about age 11 to 16 in Bangkok when his father > worked at an International School. > > There are some similarities to Percy?s biography and breadth > of interests. While Percy studied to be a physician before becoming a > novelist, Powers started out studying physics before turning to writing > fiction. His broad interests have made it into his novels where he has > explored artificial intelligence, genetics, and computer science as well as > medicine and music. He won a MacArthur Fellowship in the late ?80s. I was > first turned on to him in the early ?90s. A friend of mine who went to the > University of Illinois?where Powers had also gone?told of one of his > English professors talking about Powers, who had previously been his > student. The professor predicted that Powers would one day win the Nobel > Prize. Since Percy died, Powers is the novelist whose new work I anticipate > and seek out with the greatest eagerness. (After reading this interview, I > want to read Kim Stanley Robinson and Lydia Millet). > > The interview here focuses mainly on his newest novel, The > Overstory, which is also perhaps his most ambitious and epic book. It is > well worth the effort, and if any reader were looking for a less daunting > place to start, I would say The Echo Maker, his 2006 National Book Award > winner. In some ways it may be his most Percian novel, in its exploration > of epistemology and our search to find our place in the universe. It may be > my favorite novel, or perhaps right near the top with Percy?s The Second > Coming. > > John Pearson > Wheaton, IL > > On Jan 15, 2019, at 3:54 AM, Henry P. Mills wrote: > > Fascinating interview, Lauren. Thanks for sharing. Reminds me a bit of > Albert Schweitzer?s driving philosophy of developing ?reverence for life? - > that is, reverence for all creation in the universe, from our fellow human > beings to nature itself. I don?t know Powers? spiritual or religious > background, and those given his affinity for Percy. Anyone care to chime in > about Powers? > > On Jan 12, 2019, at 8:35 AM, Lauren Berdy > wrote: > > Of what use is the writer or poet unless he attains a new vision of life? > It is precisely why we read Dr Percy the innovator who helps to form the > great chain of creative literature. He didn?t sit comfortably down in the > ruins and piece together shards. Richard Powers too speaks to our human > horizon and predicament and brings in > Dr Percy to show how humans must ?hold the gain? in their cultivated > souls. > > > > > https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/heres-to-unsuicide-an-interview-with-richard-powers/ > > > Sent from my iPad > > > * 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 > -- Lauren Stacy Berdy Lauren.Stacy.Berdy at gmail.com TunicsUnique at gmail.com (614) 314-4162 (754) 816-7508 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jhforest at gmail.com Tue Jan 29 16:13:57 2019 From: jhforest at gmail.com (Jim Forest) Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2019 22:13:57 +0100 Subject: [percy-l] =?utf-8?q?Walker_Percy=3A_We_Still_Live_Within_the_Med?= =?utf-8?q?iated=2C_Alienated_World_of_=E2=80=9CThe_Moviegoer?= =?utf-8?b?4oCd?= Message-ID: www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/we-still-live-within-the-mediated-alienated-world-of-the-moviegoer The New Yorker / January 2, 2019 *We Still Live Within the Mediated, Alienated World of ?The Moviegoer?* By Paul Elie That it isn?t really about movies is the first surprise. Binx Bolling, the novel?s main character, is only an occasional moviegoer, both by the standards of postwar America (when Martin Scorsese would see a movie a day) and those of the present, when many of us spend most of our time looking at one screen or another. ?The Moviegoer? isn?t really about movies, and yet the title remains unexpectedly apt, just as it was when the novel, published in 1961, became a surprise winner of the National Book Award and made a sudden Southern eminence of its author, Walker Percy, a nonpracticing physician and self-taught philosopher in early middle age. It?s apt because it moves the novel (and our expectations for the novel) out of the South. It intimates that this novel, set in New Orleans, the region?s most storied city, isn?t about history or legacy, isn?t about place at all: it?s about how we see things?a novel of perception and sensibility, dealing with the search for authenticity in a scripted, stylized, mediated world. Percy?s contemporary Flannery O?Connor characterized the literature of the American South at midcentury as set against the typical. In O?Connor?s view, there was no typical Southern novel, and that was a good thing; for her, the best Southern novel was atypical just as life in the South (in her time, as she saw it) was atypical of American life as a whole. The Southern novel she celebrated takes unusual, extreme, even grotesque, behavior as its starting point. Such a novel is rooted, she explained, in ?some experience which we are not accustomed to observe every day, or which the ordinary man may never experience in his ordinary life. . . . Yet the characters have an inner coherence, if not always a coherence to their social framework. Their fictional qualities lean away from typical social patterns, toward mystery and the unexpected.? ?As I Lay Dying,? and ?Wise Blood,? and later ?A Confederacy of Dunces? and ?The Color Purple? and ?Fishboy?: these novels are fiercely atypical. But the originality of ?The Moviegoer? is more paradoxical than theirs. Unlike the novels of the South that have something of the heightened quality that came to be called gothic, ?The Moviegoer? becomes atypical through its scrutiny of the typical. It takes ordinary experience??everydayness,? Binx calls it?and makes it the subject of fitful philosophical inquiry. It promises a typical moviegoer but delivers the inimitable Binx. It calls literary categories to mind by leaning away from them. ?The Moviegoer? makes scant reference to the Civil War, to racial conflict, to old houses and barrel-aged whiskey and the notion of the South as a place where people sit around telling tall tales on front porches, whose ?tragic? history somehow binds them together. It?s a novel of New Orleans where the protagonist winds up missing Mardi Gras for a stockbrokers? convention in Chicago. It?s a Catholic novel (the main action takes place in the days before Ash Wednesday), and yet one whose protagonist considers himself not much of a Catholic at all, but a skeptic whose ?unbelief was invincible from the beginning??who tells us, ?I have only to hear the word God and a curtain comes down in my head.? It?s a distinctly American novel, but one that stands apart from the main line from Hawthorne to Twain to James and Wharton and then to Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Cather?the double helix of innocents at home and innocents abroad. Its key antecedents are the European existentialists Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Camus?the latter two of whom were also important for Ralph Ellison, who drew inspiration from them a decade before Percy, in writing ?Invisible Man.? It?s a novel of the search??the pilgrim?s search outside himself, rather than the guru?s search within,? Percy liked to say?but without the usual signposting. There?s no journey to a strange culture, no savvy guide, no sloughing off of one self and the taking on of another; no raft and river, no feasting or fasting, no new world at the end of the journey. There?s just the ?everydayness? of Binx?s life in New Orleans and the slight diversion of an overnight train ride. It?s a coming-of-age novel, but one whose protagonist is nearly twice the age of Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield. Binx is about to turn thirty, an age by which American men of midcentury were expected to have settled into their adult lives. He is a college graduate, a veteran, a stocks-and-bonds broker?and yet his self is ?left over,? as Percy put it in an essay. Nearing thirty, Binx is gripped by ?the possibility of the search? as if for the first time. The novel was a surprise even to its author. As he wrote it, Percy, like Binx, was forced out of himself and compelled to court, as O?Connor wrote, ?mystery and the unexpected? as never before. In outline, Percy?s early life was more atypical than that of any character he created. He was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1916, the eldest of three sons in a prosperous family of planters, lawyers, and politicians. When Percy was thirteen, his father committed suicide (as his father had done before him). Two years later, his mother died in a car accident that was thought by some to have been an act of self-harm. Percy and his brothers, LeRoy and Phinizy, had gone to Greenville, Mississippi, to live with his father?s cousin, William Alexander Percy, and there Walker Percy fell under the spell of this Southern man of the manor, whom he and his brothers called Uncle Will. Educated at Sewanee and Harvard Law School, a veteran of the Great War, a bachelor, religiously inclined, Uncle Will ran the plantation, presided over the civic life of Greenville, wrote poetry, exulted in orchestral music and opera, and served, Percy recalled, as ?something of a spokesman for the South.? And he raised the three orphaned Percys in the spirit of the questions he liked to pose: ?What do you love? What do you live by?? In part to get out of the great man?s shadow, Percy went north and east: to the University of North Carolina (where he was a steady moviegoer) and then to Columbia University?s medical school, in upper Manhattan. Drawn to the study of the causes of disease more than to the care of patients, he followed a course in medical pathology. As the Second World War began, he interned at Bellevue Hospital, notorious as the place where the city?s destitute were tended to?and there he contracted tuberculosis. At sanatoriums in Connecticut and upstate New York, he followed the regimen of rest and fresh air that was the nearest thing to a cure for the disease. As his TB went into remission, he began to imagine that he could pursue a career as a writer rather than as a medical doctor. ?I was in bed so much, alone so much, that I had nothing to do but read and think,? he recalled. ?I began to question everything I had once believed.? Reading Thomas Mann, Sartre, and Kierkegaard, Percy came to see the novelist as a diagnostician and the novel?the philosophical novel?as a tool with which to probe the pathology of the modern world. Religion became another instrument. Out of the sanatorium, prompted by conversations with a Catholic fellow-convalescent and recently made aware (through William Alexander Percy?s late-in-life autobiography, ?Lanterns on the Levee?) of Uncle Will?s strong attraction to Catholicism, Percy himself was drawn to the church. He had fallen in love with a nurse he knew in New Orleans, Mary Bernice Townsend, and they were married in a Baptist church; and then he and Bunt, as she was called, converted to Catholicism and settled in Louisiana, first in New Orleans and then in the burgeoning suburb of Covington, across Lake Pontchartrain. Why the turn to religion? The reason, Percy later said, was that he saw Catholicism as true, and its truths as standards by which to measure and assess the problems he saw with life in the twentieth century. Ten years passed. Percy and Bunt adopted a baby girl, and Bunt gave birth to another girl. Percy, living on inheritances, worked at being a writer. He wrote two novels, each a Southern bildungsroman: ?one a bad imitation of Thomas Mann,? he later said, ?the other a worse imitation of Thomas Wolfe?which is very bad indeed.? Inspired by the postwar philosophers Gabriel Marcel (a French Catholic) and Susanne K. Langer, he began to write philosophical essays, using them to puzzle out quandaries of everyday life?such as those of the businessman-commuter in the essay he called ?The Man on the Train.? The essays, strong and strange, were published in quarterlies of literature and philosophy, and few people read them. The Percys? younger daughter, Ann, was deaf, and they placed her in a day school for students with hearing impairments in New Orleans. Percy bought a small house nearby, in the Uptown district, where he spent time during the school day. There, away from his library, his immediate family, his history, his personal story of death and loss, disease and rejuvenation, he came up with the character of John Bickerson Bolling and a loose narrative he called ?Confessions of a Movie-Goer.? A literary agent sent the manuscript to a junior editor in New York, Stanley Kauffmann, who was also the movie critic for The New Republic. Kauffmann abbreviated the title and edited the text thoroughly?sharpening the quick cuts, juxtapositions, non sequiturs, and sudden shifts of topic and tonal register that give Binx?s narration, and the novel, its distinctive style. Published in 1961, lightly publicized, little noticed, ?The Moviegoer? found its way to A. J. Liebling, The New Yorker writer, who had written a biography of the Louisiana governor Earl Long and was steeped in the culture and flavor of New Orleans. Liebling shared the novel with his wife, the novelist Jean Stafford, who was a judge for the National Book Awards that year, and the novel, not formally nominated, was put up for consideration. It was a strong year for American fiction: J. D. Salinger?s ?Franny and Zooey,? Joseph Heller?s ?Catch-22,? William Maxwell?s ?The Ch?teau,? and Isaac Bashevis Singer?s ?The Spinoza of Market Street? were all nominated. The award went to ?The Moviegoer.? Percy, accepting the prize in New York, framed the novel in terms he had explored in his essays (and which he would develop for the rest of his career): the sickness of modern Western society, the loss of the sense of the self, the role of the writer as diagnostician. Concluding, he made his most vital point indirectly: ?In short, the book attempts a modest restatement of the Judeo-Christian notion that man is more than an organism in an environment, more than an integrated personality, more even than a mature and creative individual, as the phrase goes. He is a wayfarer and a pilgrim.? Percy was a late starter as a novelist, and Binx Bolling is late coming of age, but Percy?s novel of Binx?s coming of age was ahead of its time. With its slack and offhand protagonist, its present-tense narration, its effortless mix of informal speech, images from popular culture, and frank ruminations on the meaning of life, ?The Moviegoer? is, in my estimation, the first work of what we call contemporary American fiction, the earliest novel to render a set of circumstances and an outlook that still feel recognizably ours. Faulkner once characterized his approach to writing as ?oratory out of solitude.? Of this approach Percy made a new thing altogether. The solitude of ?The Moviegoer? isn?t the solitude of a rebel or an independent, but that of a person who is alone in a crowd?in a movie theatre or on a sidewalk in the French Quarter. The oratory in the book isn?t that of the Bible or of Stoic philosophy or of a Russian novel but of a voice-over?the present-tense monologue of the person who does not tell a story so much as self-consciously offer a running commentary on life as it passes before his eyes. The present tense of the narration has acted as a preservative in the novel. The manners and everyday details, so closely observed, are noticeably those of another time. Businessmen (no longer called that) no longer wear hats to the office, and their come-ons to their female subordinates are understood as coercive and manipulative, not perks of the job; the ?silent reproaches? Binx discerns from his secretaries are said aloud. African-Americans are no longer confined to the back of the bus or prized patronizingly for their ?devotion? to white people who employ them; Jewish people are no longer reflexively regarded as figures of displacement and exile. Cinemas are no longer called movie houses, and their managers no longer stand under the marquee offering passersby a ?sample look? on a slow night. The trim certainties of the ?Baltimore Catechism? (the stuff of the novel?s epilogue) are now unknown to even the devoutest Catholic child. And yet for all that, ?The Moviegoer? seems to describe the way we live now, for its affectless protagonist observes a society whose every aspect seems mediated, contrived, statistically anticipated, manipulated in advance, so that direct experience of life can seem as elusive as the experience of God. Don DeLillo, a novelist of a generation younger than Walker Percy, spoke of the qualities of the novels that emboldened him to write fiction, and fiction of a particular kind. ?There?s a drive and a daring that go beyond technical invention,? he said. ?I think it?s right to call it a life-drive even though these books deal at times very directly with death. No optimism, no pessimism. No homesickness for lost values or for the way fiction used to be written. These books open out onto some larger mystery.? Southern, Catholic, ironic, oblique: ?The Moviegoer? doesn?t add up, quite. What is it about? What has come of Binx?s search? What has prompted him to settle down with Kate and embrace everydayness with quasi-religious devotion? ?It is impossible to say,? Binx remarks in the last line of the novel proper. It is impossible to say. And yet ?The Moviegoer,? like its central character, has an inner coherence. Its take on everydayness has the quality of wonder that is the novel?s true subject. It opens out onto some larger mystery, one that we, no less than he, are still trying to solve. *Paul Elie, a senior fellow at Georgetown University, is the author of ?The Life You Save May Be Your Own??a group portrait of Walker Percy, Flannery O?Connor, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day?and ?Reinventing Bach.* -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From honeyjbc at gmail.com Tue Jan 29 17:36:07 2019 From: honeyjbc at gmail.com (janetcantor37@yahoo.com) Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2019 22:36:07 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [percy-l] =?utf-8?q?Walker_Percy=3A_We_Still_Live_Within_the_Med?= =?utf-8?q?iated=2C_Alienated_World_of_=E2=80=9CThe_Moviegoer=E2=80=9D?= In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <306621029.3174360.1548801367766@mail.yahoo.com> My biggest wonder is what Percy would make of the dislocations of our society today.Does anyone here ever ponder how Percy would consider the extremes of twitter or the main stream media in their search and destroy missions?Wouldn't it be funny to read Percy's take on current events? The ease with which Senators and journalists feel justified as they destroy a man's name without any corroboration just because it fits their political need of the moment, the early morning raid of a private citizen's house, conveniently captured by CNN television cameras, when the authorities could just as easily asked him to turn himself in, the delight of using destructive rhetoric even if it means the death of policemen or private citizens, the way one day Russia is not a problem, but a president who wants to stop communism is the problem, but now Russia is turned into evil inc. - ?things like this are so ready for satire.The double standards of who is behaving badly depending on who is in power at the moment... Do others ever think about these questions? How valuable a Percy novel about our time would be for us! Janet Cantor On Tuesday, January 29, 2019, 4:14:38 PM EST, Jim Forest wrote: www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/we-still-live-within-the-mediated-alienated-world-of-the-moviegoer ? The New Yorker / January 2, 2019 ? We Still Live Withinthe Mediated, Alienated World of ?The Moviegoer? ? By Paul Elie ? That it isn?t really about movies is the first surprise.Binx Bolling, the novel?s main character, is only an occasional moviegoer, bothby the standards of postwar America (when Martin Scorsese would see a movie aday) and those of the present, when many of us spend most of our time looking atone screen or another. ? ?The Moviegoer? isn?t really about movies, and yet the titleremains unexpectedly apt, just as it was when the novel, published in 1961,became a surprise winner of the National Book Award and made a sudden Southerneminence of its author, Walker Percy, a nonpracticing physician and self-taughtphilosopher in early middle age. It?s apt because it moves the novel (and ourexpectations for the novel) out of the South. It intimates that this novel, setin New Orleans, the region?s most storied city, isn?t about history or legacy,isn?t about place at all: it?s about how we see things?a novel of perceptionand sensibility, dealing with the search for authenticity in a scripted,stylized, mediated world. ? Percy?s contemporary Flannery O?Connor characterized theliterature of the American South at midcentury as set against the typical. InO?Connor?s view, there was no typical Southern novel, and that was a goodthing; for her, the best Southern novel was atypical just as life in the South(in her time, as she saw it) was atypical of American life as a whole. TheSouthern novel she celebrated takes unusual, extreme, even grotesque, behavioras its starting point. Such a novel is rooted, she explained, in ?someexperience which we are not accustomed to observe every day, or which theordinary man may never experience in his ordinary life. .?.?. Yet thecharacters have an inner coherence, if not always a coherence to their socialframework. Their fictional qualities lean away from typical social patterns,toward mystery and the unexpected.? ? ?As I Lay Dying,? and ?Wise Blood,? and later ?A Confederacyof Dunces? and ?The Color Purple? and ?Fishboy?: these novels are fiercelyatypical. But the originality of ?The Moviegoer? is more paradoxical thantheirs. Unlike the novels of the South that have something of the heightenedquality that came to be called gothic, ?The Moviegoer? becomes atypical throughits scrutiny of the typical. It takes ordinary experience??everydayness,? Binxcalls it?and makes it the subject of fitful philosophical inquiry. It promisesa typical moviegoer but delivers the inimitable Binx. It calls literarycategories to mind by leaning away from them. ? ?The Moviegoer? makes scant reference to the Civil War, toracial conflict, to old houses and barrel-aged whiskey and the notion of theSouth as a place where people sit around telling tall tales on front porches,whose ?tragic? history somehow binds them together. It?s a novel of New Orleanswhere the protagonist winds up missing Mardi Gras for a stockbrokers?convention in Chicago. ? It?s a Catholic novel (the main action takes place in thedays before Ash Wednesday), and yet one whose protagonist considers himself notmuch of a Catholic at all, but a skeptic whose ?unbelief was invincible fromthe beginning??who tells us, ?I have only to hear the word God and a curtaincomes down in my head.? ? It?s a distinctly American novel, but one that stands apartfrom the main line from Hawthorne to Twain to James and Wharton and then to Fitzgerald,Hemingway, and Cather?the double helix of innocents at home and innocentsabroad. Its key antecedents are the European existentialists Kierkegaard,Sartre, and Camus?the latter two of whom were also important for Ralph Ellison,who drew inspiration from them a decade before Percy, in writing ?InvisibleMan.? ? It?s a novel of the search??the pilgrim?s search outsidehimself, rather than the guru?s search within,? Percy liked to say?but withoutthe usual signposting. There?s no journey to a strange culture, no savvy guide,no sloughing off of one self and the taking on of another; no raft and river,no feasting or fasting, no new world at the end of the journey. There?s justthe ?everydayness? of Binx?s life in New Orleans and the slight diversion of anovernight train ride. ? It?s a coming-of-age novel, but one whose protagonist isnearly twice the age of Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield. Binx is about to turnthirty, an age by which American men of midcentury were expected to havesettled into their adult lives. He is a college graduate, a veteran, astocks-and-bonds broker?and yet his self is ?left over,? as Percy put it in anessay. Nearing thirty, Binx is gripped by ?the possibility of the search? as iffor the first time. The novel was a surprise even to its author. As he wroteit, Percy, like Binx, was forced out of himself and compelled to court, asO?Connor wrote, ?mystery and the unexpected? as never before. ? In outline, Percy?s early life was more atypical than thatof any character he created. He was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1916, theeldest of three sons in a prosperous family of planters, lawyers, andpoliticians. When Percy was thirteen, his father committed suicide (as hisfather had done before him). Two years later, his mother died in a car accidentthat was thought by some to have been an act of self-harm. Percy and hisbrothers, LeRoy and Phinizy, had gone to Greenville, Mississippi, to live withhis father?s cousin, William Alexander Percy, and there Walker Percy fell underthe spell of this Southern man of the manor, whom he and his brothers calledUncle Will. Educated at Sewanee and Harvard Law School, a veteran of the GreatWar, a bachelor, religiously inclined, Uncle Will ran the plantation, presidedover the civic life of Greenville, wrote poetry, exulted in orchestral musicand opera, and served, Percy recalled, as ?something of a spokesman for theSouth.? And he raised the three orphaned Percys in the spirit of the questionshe liked to pose: ?What do you love? What do you live by?? ? In part to get out of the great man?s shadow, Percy wentnorth and east: to the University of North Carolina (where he was a steadymoviegoer) and then to Columbia University?s medical school, in upperManhattan. Drawn to the study of the causes of disease more than to the care ofpatients, he followed a course in medical pathology. As the Second World Warbegan, he interned at Bellevue Hospital, notorious as the place where thecity?s destitute were tended to?and there he contracted tuberculosis. Atsanatoriums in Connecticut and upstate New York, he followed the regimen ofrest and fresh air that was the nearest thing to a cure for the disease. As hisTB went into remission, he began to imagine that he could pursue a career as awriter rather than as a medical doctor. ?I was in bed so much, alone so much,that I had nothing to do but read and think,? he recalled. ?I began to questioneverything I had once believed.? Reading Thomas Mann, Sartre, and Kierkegaard,Percy came to see the novelist as a diagnostician and the novel?thephilosophical novel?as a tool with which to probe the pathology of the modernworld. ? Religion became another instrument. Out of the sanatorium,prompted by conversations with a Catholic fellow-convalescent and recently madeaware (through William Alexander Percy?s late-in-life autobiography, ?Lanternson the Levee?) of Uncle Will?s strong attraction to Catholicism, Percy himselfwas drawn to the church. He had fallen in love with a nurse he knew in NewOrleans, Mary Bernice Townsend, and they were married in a Baptist church; andthen he and Bunt, as she was called, converted to Catholicism and settled inLouisiana, first in New Orleans and then in the burgeoning suburb of Covington,across Lake Pontchartrain. Why the turn to religion? The reason, Percy latersaid, was that he saw Catholicism as true, and its truths as standards by whichto measure and assess the problems he saw with life in the twentieth century. ? Ten years passed. Percy and Bunt adopted a baby girl, andBunt gave birth to another girl. Percy, living on inheritances, worked at beinga writer. He wrote two novels, each a Southern bildungsroman: ?one a badimitation of Thomas Mann,? he later said, ?the other a worse imitation ofThomas Wolfe?which is very bad indeed.? Inspired by the postwar philosophersGabriel Marcel (a French Catholic) and Susanne K. Langer, he began to writephilosophical essays, using them to puzzle out quandaries of everyday life?suchas those of the businessman-commuter in the essay he called ?The Man on theTrain.? The essays, strong and strange, were published in quarterlies ofliterature and philosophy, and few people read them. ? The Percys? younger daughter, Ann, was deaf, and they placedher in a day school for students with hearing impairments in New Orleans. Percybought a small house nearby, in the Uptown district, where he spent time duringthe school day. There, away from his library, his immediate family, hishistory, his personal story of death and loss, disease and rejuvenation, hecame up with the character of John Bickerson Bolling and a loose narrative hecalled ?Confessions of a Movie-Goer.? ? A literary agent sent the manuscript to a junior editor inNew York, Stanley Kauffmann, who was also the movie critic for The NewRepublic. Kauffmann abbreviated the title and edited the textthoroughly?sharpening the quick cuts, juxtapositions, non sequiturs, and suddenshifts of topic and tonal register that give Binx?s narration, and the novel,its distinctive style. ? Published in 1961, lightly publicized, little noticed, ?TheMoviegoer? found its way to A. J. Liebling, The New Yorker writer, who hadwritten a biography of the Louisiana governor Earl Long and was steeped in theculture and flavor of New Orleans. Liebling shared the novel with his wife, thenovelist Jean Stafford, who was a judge for the National Book Awards that year,and the novel, not formally nominated, was put up for consideration. It was astrong year for American fiction: J. D. Salinger?s ?Franny and Zooey,? JosephHeller?s ?Catch-22,? William Maxwell?s ?The Ch?teau,? and Isaac BashevisSinger?s ?The Spinoza of Market Street? were all nominated. The award went to?The Moviegoer.? Percy, accepting the prize in New York, framed the novel interms he had explored in his essays (and which he would develop for the rest ofhis career): the sickness of modern Western society, the loss of the sense ofthe self, the role of the writer as diagnostician. Concluding, he made his mostvital point indirectly: ?In short, the book attempts a modest restatement ofthe Judeo-Christian notion that man is more than an organism in an environment,more than an integrated personality, more even than a mature and creativeindividual, as the phrase goes. He is a wayfarer and a pilgrim.? ? Percy was a late starter as a novelist, and Binx Bolling islate coming of age, but Percy?s novel of Binx?s coming of age was ahead of itstime. With its slack and offhand protagonist, its present-tense narration, itseffortless mix of informal speech, images from popular culture, and frankruminations on the meaning of life, ?The Moviegoer? is, in my estimation, thefirst work of what we call contemporary American fiction, the earliest novel torender a set of circumstances and an outlook that still feel recognizably ours. ? Faulkner once characterized his approach to writing as?oratory out of solitude.? Of this approach Percy made a new thing altogether.The solitude of ?The Moviegoer? isn?t the solitude of a rebel or anindependent, but that of a person who is alone in a crowd?in a movie theatre oron a sidewalk in the French Quarter. The oratory in the book isn?t that of theBible or of Stoic philosophy or of a Russian novel but of a voice-over?thepresent-tense monologue of the person who does not tell a story so much asself-consciously offer a running commentary on life as it passes before hiseyes. ? The present tense of the narration has acted as apreservative in the novel. The manners and everyday details, so closelyobserved, are noticeably those of another time. Businessmen (no longer calledthat) no longer wear hats to the office, and their come-ons to their femalesubordinates are understood as coercive and manipulative, not perks of the job;the ?silent reproaches? Binx discerns from his secretaries are said aloud.African-Americans are no longer confined to the back of the bus or prizedpatronizingly for their ?devotion? to white people who employ them; Jewishpeople are no longer reflexively regarded as figures of displacement and exile.Cinemas are no longer called movie houses, and their managers no longer standunder the marquee offering passersby a ?sample look? on a slow night. The trimcertainties of the ?Baltimore Catechism? (the stuff of the novel?s epilogue)are now unknown to even the devoutest Catholic child. ? And yet for all that, ?The Moviegoer? seems to describe theway we live now, for its affectless protagonist observes a society whose everyaspect seems mediated, contrived, statistically anticipated, manipulated inadvance, so that direct experience of life can seem as elusive as theexperience of God. ? Don DeLillo, a novelist of a generation younger than WalkerPercy, spoke of the qualities of the novels that emboldened him to writefiction, and fiction of a particular kind. ?There?s a drive and a daring thatgo beyond technical invention,? he said. ?I think it?s right to call it alife-drive even though these books deal at times very directly with death. Nooptimism, no pessimism. No homesickness for lost values or for the way fictionused to be written. These books open out onto some larger mystery.? ? Southern, Catholic, ironic, oblique: ?The Moviegoer? doesn?tadd up, quite. What is it about? What has come of Binx?s search? What hasprompted him to settle down with Kate and embrace everydayness withquasi-religious devotion? ?It is impossible to say,? Binx remarks in the lastline of the novel proper. It is impossible to say. And yet ?The Moviegoer,?like its central character, has an inner coherence. Its take on everydaynesshas the quality of wonder that is the novel?s true subject. It opens out onto somelarger mystery, one that we, no less than he, are still trying to solve. ? Paul Elie, a senior fellow at Georgetown University, is theauthor of ?The Life You Save May Be Your Own??a group portrait of Walker Percy,Flannery O?Connor, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day?and ?Reinventing Bach. * 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: From mhsmithjrlaw at gmail.com Tue Jan 29 20:06:39 2019 From: mhsmithjrlaw at gmail.com (Marshall Smith) Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2019 17:06:39 -0800 Subject: [percy-l] =?utf-8?q?Walker_Percy=3A_We_Still_Live_Within_the_Med?= =?utf-8?q?iated=2C_Alienated_World_of_=E2=80=9CThe_Moviegoer=E2=80=9D?= In-Reply-To: <306621029.3174360.1548801367766@mail.yahoo.com> References: <306621029.3174360.1548801367766@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: He would probably have a rueful laugh at your attempt to be politically evenhanded while advancing a Knothead Trump agenda. Then he would hold forth about how political language is evacuated of meaning. Then he might have a drink of bourbon, neat. Marshall Sent from my iPhone > On Jan 29, 2019, at 2:36 PM, janetcantor37 at yahoo.com wrote: > > My biggest wonder is what Percy would make of the dislocations of our society today. > Does anyone here ever ponder how Percy would consider the extremes of twitter or the main stream media in their search and destroy missions? > Wouldn't it be funny to read Percy's take on current events? > > The ease with which Senators and journalists feel justified as they destroy a man's name without any corroboration just because it fits their political need of the moment, the early morning raid of a private citizen's house, conveniently captured by CNN television cameras, when the authorities could just as easily asked him to turn himself in, the delight of using destructive rhetoric even if it means the death of policemen or private citizens, the way one day Russia is not a problem, but a president who wants to stop communism is the problem, but now Russia is turned into evil inc. - things like this are so ready for satire. > The double standards of who is behaving badly depending on who is in power at the moment... > > Do others ever think about these questions? > > How valuable a Percy novel about our time would be for us! > > Janet Cantor > > > > > On Tuesday, January 29, 2019, 4:14:38 PM EST, Jim Forest wrote: > > > www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/we-still-live-within-the-mediated-alienated-world-of-the-moviegoer > > The New Yorker / January 2, 2019 > > We Still Live Within the Mediated, Alienated World of ?The Moviegoer? > > By Paul Elie > > That it isn?t really about movies is the first surprise. Binx Bolling, the novel?s main character, is only an occasional moviegoer, both by the standards of postwar America (when Martin Scorsese would see a movie a day) and those of the present, when many of us spend most of our time looking at one screen or another. > > ?The Moviegoer? isn?t really about movies, and yet the title remains unexpectedly apt, just as it was when the novel, published in 1961, became a surprise winner of the National Book Award and made a sudden Southern eminence of its author, Walker Percy, a nonpracticing physician and self-taught philosopher in early middle age. It?s apt because it moves the novel (and our expectations for the novel) out of the South. It intimates that this novel, set in New Orleans, the region?s most storied city, isn?t about history or legacy, isn?t about place at all: it?s about how we see things?a novel of perception and sensibility, dealing with the search for authenticity in a scripted, stylized, mediated world. > > Percy?s contemporary Flannery O?Connor characterized the literature of the American South at midcentury as set against the typical. In O?Connor?s view, there was no typical Southern novel, and that was a good thing; for her, the best Southern novel was atypical just as life in the South (in her time, as she saw it) was atypical of American life as a whole. The Southern novel she celebrated takes unusual, extreme, even grotesque, behavior as its starting point. Such a novel is rooted, she explained, in ?some experience which we are not accustomed to observe every day, or which the ordinary man may never experience in his ordinary life. .?.?. Yet the characters have an inner coherence, if not always a coherence to their social framework. Their fictional qualities lean away from typical social patterns, toward mystery and the unexpected.? > > ?As I Lay Dying,? and ?Wise Blood,? and later ?A Confederacy of Dunces? and ?The Color Purple? and ?Fishboy?: these novels are fiercely atypical. But the originality of ?The Moviegoer? is more paradoxical than theirs. Unlike the novels of the South that have something of the heightened quality that came to be called gothic, ?The Moviegoer? becomes atypical through its scrutiny of the typical. It takes ordinary experience??everydayness,? Binx calls it?and makes it the subject of fitful philosophical inquiry. It promises a typical moviegoer but delivers the inimitable Binx. It calls literary categories to mind by leaning away from them. > > ?The Moviegoer? makes scant reference to the Civil War, to racial conflict, to old houses and barrel-aged whiskey and the notion of the South as a place where people sit around telling tall tales on front porches, whose ?tragic? history somehow binds them together. It?s a novel of New Orleans where the protagonist winds up missing Mardi Gras for a stockbrokers? convention in Chicago. > > It?s a Catholic novel (the main action takes place in the days before Ash Wednesday), and yet one whose protagonist considers himself not much of a Catholic at all, but a skeptic whose ?unbelief was invincible from the beginning??who tells us, ?I have only to hear the word God and a curtain comes down in my head.? > > It?s a distinctly American novel, but one that stands apart from the main line from Hawthorne to Twain to James and Wharton and then to Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Cather?the double helix of innocents at home and innocents abroad. Its key antecedents are the European existentialists Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Camus?the latter two of whom were also important for Ralph Ellison, who drew inspiration from them a decade before Percy, in writing ?Invisible Man.? > > It?s a novel of the search??the pilgrim?s search outside himself, rather than the guru?s search within,? Percy liked to say?but without the usual signposting. There?s no journey to a strange culture, no savvy guide, no sloughing off of one self and the taking on of another; no raft and river, no feasting or fasting, no new world at the end of the journey. There?s just the ?everydayness? of Binx?s life in New Orleans and the slight diversion of an overnight train ride. > > It?s a coming-of-age novel, but one whose protagonist is nearly twice the age of Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield. Binx is about to turn thirty, an age by which American men of midcentury were expected to have settled into their adult lives. He is a college graduate, a veteran, a stocks-and-bonds broker?and yet his self is ?left over,? as Percy put it in an essay. Nearing thirty, Binx is gripped by ?the possibility of the search? as if for the first time. The novel was a surprise even to its author. As he wrote it, Percy, like Binx, was forced out of himself and compelled to court, as O?Connor wrote, ?mystery and the unexpected? as never before. > > In outline, Percy?s early life was more atypical than that of any character he created. He was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1916, the eldest of three sons in a prosperous family of planters, lawyers, and politicians. When Percy was thirteen, his father committed suicide (as his father had done before him). Two years later, his mother died in a car accident that was thought by some to have been an act of self-harm. Percy and his brothers, LeRoy and Phinizy, had gone to Greenville, Mississippi, to live with his father?s cousin, William Alexander Percy, and there Walker Percy fell under the spell of this Southern man of the manor, whom he and his brothers called Uncle Will. Educated at Sewanee and Harvard Law School, a veteran of the Great War, a bachelor, religiously inclined, Uncle Will ran the plantation, presided over the civic life of Greenville, wrote poetry, exulted in orchestral music and opera, and served, Percy recalled, as ?something of a spokesman for the South.? And he raised the three orphaned Percys in the spirit of the questions he liked to pose: ?What do you love? What do you live by?? > > In part to get out of the great man?s shadow, Percy went north and east: to the University of North Carolina (where he was a steady moviegoer) and then to Columbia University?s medical school, in upper Manhattan. Drawn to the study of the causes of disease more than to the care of patients, he followed a course in medical pathology. As the Second World War began, he interned at Bellevue Hospital, notorious as the place where the city?s destitute were tended to?and there he contracted tuberculosis. At sanatoriums in Connecticut and upstate New York, he followed the regimen of rest and fresh air that was the nearest thing to a cure for the disease. As his TB went into remission, he began to imagine that he could pursue a career as a writer rather than as a medical doctor. ?I was in bed so much, alone so much, that I had nothing to do but read and think,? he recalled. ?I began to question everything I had once believed.? Reading Thomas Mann, Sartre, and Kierkegaard, Percy came to see the novelist as a diagnostician and the novel?the philosophical novel?as a tool with which to probe the pathology of the modern world. > > Religion became another instrument. Out of the sanatorium, prompted by conversations with a Catholic fellow-convalescent and recently made aware (through William Alexander Percy?s late-in-life autobiography, ?Lanterns on the Levee?) of Uncle Will?s strong attraction to Catholicism, Percy himself was drawn to the church. He had fallen in love with a nurse he knew in New Orleans, Mary Bernice Townsend, and they were married in a Baptist church; and then he and Bunt, as she was called, converted to Catholicism and settled in Louisiana, first in New Orleans and then in the burgeoning suburb of Covington, across Lake Pontchartrain. Why the turn to religion? The reason, Percy later said, was that he saw Catholicism as true, and its truths as standards by which to measure and assess the problems he saw with life in the twentieth century. > > Ten years passed. Percy and Bunt adopted a baby girl, and Bunt gave birth to another girl. Percy, living on inheritances, worked at being a writer. He wrote two novels, each a Southern bildungsroman: ?one a bad imitation of Thomas Mann,? he later said, ?the other a worse imitation of Thomas Wolfe?which is very bad indeed.? Inspired by the postwar philosophers Gabriel Marcel (a French Catholic) and Susanne K. Langer, he began to write philosophical essays, using them to puzzle out quandaries of everyday life?such as those of the businessman-commuter in the essay he called ?The Man on the Train.? The essays, strong and strange, were published in quarterlies of literature and philosophy, and few people read them. > > The Percys? younger daughter, Ann, was deaf, and they placed her in a day school for students with hearing impairments in New Orleans. Percy bought a small house nearby, in the Uptown district, where he spent time during the school day. There, away from his library, his immediate family, his history, his personal story of death and loss, disease and rejuvenation, he came up with the character of John Bickerson Bolling and a loose narrative he called ?Confessions of a Movie-Goer.? > > A literary agent sent the manuscript to a junior editor in New York, Stanley Kauffmann, who was also the movie critic for The New Republic. Kauffmann abbreviated the title and edited the text thoroughly?sharpening the quick cuts, juxtapositions, non sequiturs, and sudden shifts of topic and tonal register that give Binx?s narration, and the novel, its distinctive style. > > Published in 1961, lightly publicized, little noticed, ?The Moviegoer? found its way to A. J. Liebling, The New Yorker writer, who had written a biography of the Louisiana governor Earl Long and was steeped in the culture and flavor of New Orleans. Liebling shared the novel with his wife, the novelist Jean Stafford, who was a judge for the National Book Awards that year, and the novel, not formally nominated, was put up for consideration. It was a strong year for American fiction: J. D. Salinger?s ?Franny and Zooey,? Joseph Heller?s ?Catch-22,? William Maxwell?s ?The Ch?teau,? and Isaac Bashevis Singer?s ?The Spinoza of Market Street? were all nominated. The award went to ?The Moviegoer.? Percy, accepting the prize in New York, framed the novel in terms he had explored in his essays (and which he would develop for the rest of his career): the sickness of modern Western society, the loss of the sense of the self, the role of the writer as diagnostician. Concluding, he made his most vital point indirectly: ?In short, the book attempts a modest restatement of the Judeo-Christian notion that man is more than an organism in an environment, more than an integrated personality, more even than a mature and creative individual, as the phrase goes. He is a wayfarer and a pilgrim.? > > Percy was a late starter as a novelist, and Binx Bolling is late coming of age, but Percy?s novel of Binx?s coming of age was ahead of its time. With its slack and offhand protagonist, its present-tense narration, its effortless mix of informal speech, images from popular culture, and frank ruminations on the meaning of life, ?The Moviegoer? is, in my estimation, the first work of what we call contemporary American fiction, the earliest novel to render a set of circumstances and an outlook that still feel recognizably ours. > > Faulkner once characterized his approach to writing as ?oratory out of solitude.? Of this approach Percy made a new thing altogether. The solitude of ?The Moviegoer? isn?t the solitude of a rebel or an independent, but that of a person who is alone in a crowd?in a movie theatre or on a sidewalk in the French Quarter. The oratory in the book isn?t that of the Bible or of Stoic philosophy or of a Russian novel but of a voice-over?the present-tense monologue of the person who does not tell a story so much as self-consciously offer a running commentary on life as it passes before his eyes. > > The present tense of the narration has acted as a preservative in the novel. The manners and everyday details, so closely observed, are noticeably those of another time. Businessmen (no longer called that) no longer wear hats to the office, and their come-ons to their female subordinates are understood as coercive and manipulative, not perks of the job; the ?silent reproaches? Binx discerns from his secretaries are said aloud. African-Americans are no longer confined to the back of the bus or prized patronizingly for their ?devotion? to white people who employ them; Jewish people are no longer reflexively regarded as figures of displacement and exile. Cinemas are no longer called movie houses, and their managers no longer stand under the marquee offering passersby a ?sample look? on a slow night. The trim certainties of the ?Baltimore Catechism? (the stuff of the novel?s epilogue) are now unknown to even the devoutest Catholic child. > > And yet for all that, ?The Moviegoer? seems to describe the way we live now, for its affectless protagonist observes a society whose every aspect seems mediated, contrived, statistically anticipated, manipulated in advance, so that direct experience of life can seem as elusive as the experience of God. > > Don DeLillo, a novelist of a generation younger than Walker Percy, spoke of the qualities of the novels that emboldened him to write fiction, and fiction of a particular kind. ?There?s a drive and a daring that go beyond technical invention,? he said. ?I think it?s right to call it a life-drive even though these books deal at times very directly with death. No optimism, no pessimism. No homesickness for lost values or for the way fiction used to be written. These books open out onto some larger mystery.? > > Southern, Catholic, ironic, oblique: ?The Moviegoer? doesn?t add up, quite. What is it about? What has come of Binx?s search? What has prompted him to settle down with Kate and embrace everydayness with quasi-religious devotion? ?It is impossible to say,? Binx remarks in the last line of the novel proper. It is impossible to say. And yet ?The Moviegoer,? like its central character, has an inner coherence. Its take on everydayness has the quality of wonder that is the novel?s true subject. It opens out onto some larger mystery, one that we, no less than he, are still trying to solve. > > Paul Elie, a senior fellow at Georgetown University, is the author of ?The Life You Save May Be Your Own??a group portrait of Walker Percy, Flannery O?Connor, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day?and ?Reinventing Bach. > * 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: From lauren.stacy.berdy at gmail.com Tue Jan 29 21:30:59 2019 From: lauren.stacy.berdy at gmail.com (Lauren Berdy) Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2019 21:30:59 -0500 Subject: [percy-l] =?utf-8?q?Walker_Percy=3A_We_Still_Live_Within_the_Med?= =?utf-8?q?iated=2C_Alienated_World_of_=E2=80=9CThe_Moviegoer=E2=80=9D?= In-Reply-To: References: <306621029.3174360.1548801367766@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <241B013C-46C6-49BC-964D-A056EF84091E@gmail.com> Recently I went back to ?signposts? I encountered this gem ? once the final break is made between language and reality Arguments generate their own force and lay out their own logical rules? Sent from my iPad > On Jan 29, 2019, at 8:06 PM, Marshall Smith wrote: > > He would probably have a rueful laugh at your attempt to be politically evenhanded while advancing a Knothead Trump agenda. Then he would hold forth about how political language is evacuated of meaning. Then he might have a drink of bourbon, neat. > > Marshall > Sent from my iPhone > >> On Jan 29, 2019, at 2:36 PM, janetcantor37 at yahoo.com wrote: >> >> My biggest wonder is what Percy would make of the dislocations of our society today. >> Does anyone here ever ponder how Percy would consider the extremes of twitter or the main stream media in their search and destroy missions? >> Wouldn't it be funny to read Percy's take on current events? >> >> The ease with which Senators and journalists feel justified as they destroy a man's name without any corroboration just because it fits their political need of the moment, the early morning raid of a private citizen's house, conveniently captured by CNN television cameras, when the authorities could just as easily asked him to turn himself in, the delight of using destructive rhetoric even if it means the death of policemen or private citizens, the way one day Russia is not a problem, but a president who wants to stop communism is the problem, but now Russia is turned into evil inc. - things like this are so ready for satire. >> The double standards of who is behaving badly depending on who is in power at the moment... >> >> Do others ever think about these questions? >> >> How valuable a Percy novel about our time would be for us! >> >> Janet Cantor >> >> >> >> >> On Tuesday, January 29, 2019, 4:14:38 PM EST, Jim Forest wrote: >> >> >> www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/we-still-live-within-the-mediated-alienated-world-of-the-moviegoer >> >> The New Yorker / January 2, 2019 >> >> We Still Live Within the Mediated, Alienated World of ?The Moviegoer? >> >> By Paul Elie >> >> That it isn?t really about movies is the first surprise. Binx Bolling, the novel?s main character, is only an occasional moviegoer, both by the standards of postwar America (when Martin Scorsese would see a movie a day) and those of the present, when many of us spend most of our time looking at one screen or another. >> >> ?The Moviegoer? isn?t really about movies, and yet the title remains unexpectedly apt, just as it was when the novel, published in 1961, became a surprise winner of the National Book Award and made a sudden Southern eminence of its author, Walker Percy, a nonpracticing physician and self-taught philosopher in early middle age. It?s apt because it moves the novel (and our expectations for the novel) out of the South. It intimates that this novel, set in New Orleans, the region?s most storied city, isn?t about history or legacy, isn?t about place at all: it?s about how we see things?a novel of perception and sensibility, dealing with the search for authenticity in a scripted, stylized, mediated world. >> >> Percy?s contemporary Flannery O?Connor characterized the literature of the American South at midcentury as set against the typical. In O?Connor?s view, there was no typical Southern novel, and that was a good thing; for her, the best Southern novel was atypical just as life in the South (in her time, as she saw it) was atypical of American life as a whole. The Southern novel she celebrated takes unusual, extreme, even grotesque, behavior as its starting point. Such a novel is rooted, she explained, in ?some experience which we are not accustomed to observe every day, or which the ordinary man may never experience in his ordinary life. .?.?. Yet the characters have an inner coherence, if not always a coherence to their social framework. Their fictional qualities lean away from typical social patterns, toward mystery and the unexpected.? >> >> ?As I Lay Dying,? and ?Wise Blood,? and later ?A Confederacy of Dunces? and ?The Color Purple? and ?Fishboy?: these novels are fiercely atypical. But the originality of ?The Moviegoer? is more paradoxical than theirs. Unlike the novels of the South that have something of the heightened quality that came to be called gothic, ?The Moviegoer? becomes atypical through its scrutiny of the typical. It takes ordinary experience??everydayness,? Binx calls it?and makes it the subject of fitful philosophical inquiry. It promises a typical moviegoer but delivers the inimitable Binx. It calls literary categories to mind by leaning away from them. >> >> ?The Moviegoer? makes scant reference to the Civil War, to racial conflict, to old houses and barrel-aged whiskey and the notion of the South as a place where people sit around telling tall tales on front porches, whose ?tragic? history somehow binds them together. It?s a novel of New Orleans where the protagonist winds up missing Mardi Gras for a stockbrokers? convention in Chicago. >> >> It?s a Catholic novel (the main action takes place in the days before Ash Wednesday), and yet one whose protagonist considers himself not much of a Catholic at all, but a skeptic whose ?unbelief was invincible from the beginning??who tells us, ?I have only to hear the word God and a curtain comes down in my head.? >> >> It?s a distinctly American novel, but one that stands apart from the main line from Hawthorne to Twain to James and Wharton and then to Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Cather?the double helix of innocents at home and innocents abroad. Its key antecedents are the European existentialists Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Camus?the latter two of whom were also important for Ralph Ellison, who drew inspiration from them a decade before Percy, in writing ?Invisible Man.? >> >> It?s a novel of the search??the pilgrim?s search outside himself, rather than the guru?s search within,? Percy liked to say?but without the usual signposting. There?s no journey to a strange culture, no savvy guide, no sloughing off of one self and the taking on of another; no raft and river, no feasting or fasting, no new world at the end of the journey. There?s just the ?everydayness? of Binx?s life in New Orleans and the slight diversion of an overnight train ride. >> >> It?s a coming-of-age novel, but one whose protagonist is nearly twice the age of Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield. Binx is about to turn thirty, an age by which American men of midcentury were expected to have settled into their adult lives. He is a college graduate, a veteran, a stocks-and-bonds broker?and yet his self is ?left over,? as Percy put it in an essay. Nearing thirty, Binx is gripped by ?the possibility of the search? as if for the first time. The novel was a surprise even to its author. As he wrote it, Percy, like Binx, was forced out of himself and compelled to court, as O?Connor wrote, ?mystery and the unexpected? as never before. >> >> In outline, Percy?s early life was more atypical than that of any character he created. He was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1916, the eldest of three sons in a prosperous family of planters, lawyers, and politicians. When Percy was thirteen, his father committed suicide (as his father had done before him). Two years later, his mother died in a car accident that was thought by some to have been an act of self-harm. Percy and his brothers, LeRoy and Phinizy, had gone to Greenville, Mississippi, to live with his father?s cousin, William Alexander Percy, and there Walker Percy fell under the spell of this Southern man of the manor, whom he and his brothers called Uncle Will. Educated at Sewanee and Harvard Law School, a veteran of the Great War, a bachelor, religiously inclined, Uncle Will ran the plantation, presided over the civic life of Greenville, wrote poetry, exulted in orchestral music and opera, and served, Percy recalled, as ?something of a spokesman for the South.? And he raised the three orphaned Percys in the spirit of the questions he liked to pose: ?What do you love? What do you live by?? >> >> In part to get out of the great man?s shadow, Percy went north and east: to the University of North Carolina (where he was a steady moviegoer) and then to Columbia University?s medical school, in upper Manhattan. Drawn to the study of the causes of disease more than to the care of patients, he followed a course in medical pathology. As the Second World War began, he interned at Bellevue Hospital, notorious as the place where the city?s destitute were tended to?and there he contracted tuberculosis. At sanatoriums in Connecticut and upstate New York, he followed the regimen of rest and fresh air that was the nearest thing to a cure for the disease. As his TB went into remission, he began to imagine that he could pursue a career as a writer rather than as a medical doctor. ?I was in bed so much, alone so much, that I had nothing to do but read and think,? he recalled. ?I began to question everything I had once believed.? Reading Thomas Mann, Sartre, and Kierkegaard, Percy came to see the novelist as a diagnostician and the novel?the philosophical novel?as a tool with which to probe the pathology of the modern world. >> >> Religion became another instrument. Out of the sanatorium, prompted by conversations with a Catholic fellow-convalescent and recently made aware (through William Alexander Percy?s late-in-life autobiography, ?Lanterns on the Levee?) of Uncle Will?s strong attraction to Catholicism, Percy himself was drawn to the church. He had fallen in love with a nurse he knew in New Orleans, Mary Bernice Townsend, and they were married in a Baptist church; and then he and Bunt, as she was called, converted to Catholicism and settled in Louisiana, first in New Orleans and then in the burgeoning suburb of Covington, across Lake Pontchartrain. Why the turn to religion? The reason, Percy later said, was that he saw Catholicism as true, and its truths as standards by which to measure and assess the problems he saw with life in the twentieth century. >> >> Ten years passed. Percy and Bunt adopted a baby girl, and Bunt gave birth to another girl. Percy, living on inheritances, worked at being a writer. He wrote two novels, each a Southern bildungsroman: ?one a bad imitation of Thomas Mann,? he later said, ?the other a worse imitation of Thomas Wolfe?which is very bad indeed.? Inspired by the postwar philosophers Gabriel Marcel (a French Catholic) and Susanne K. Langer, he began to write philosophical essays, using them to puzzle out quandaries of everyday life?such as those of the businessman-commuter in the essay he called ?The Man on the Train.? The essays, strong and strange, were published in quarterlies of literature and philosophy, and few people read them. >> >> The Percys? younger daughter, Ann, was deaf, and they placed her in a day school for students with hearing impairments in New Orleans. Percy bought a small house nearby, in the Uptown district, where he spent time during the school day. There, away from his library, his immediate family, his history, his personal story of death and loss, disease and rejuvenation, he came up with the character of John Bickerson Bolling and a loose narrative he called ?Confessions of a Movie-Goer.? >> >> A literary agent sent the manuscript to a junior editor in New York, Stanley Kauffmann, who was also the movie critic for The New Republic. Kauffmann abbreviated the title and edited the text thoroughly?sharpening the quick cuts, juxtapositions, non sequiturs, and sudden shifts of topic and tonal register that give Binx?s narration, and the novel, its distinctive style. >> >> Published in 1961, lightly publicized, little noticed, ?The Moviegoer? found its way to A. J. Liebling, The New Yorker writer, who had written a biography of the Louisiana governor Earl Long and was steeped in the culture and flavor of New Orleans. Liebling shared the novel with his wife, the novelist Jean Stafford, who was a judge for the National Book Awards that year, and the novel, not formally nominated, was put up for consideration. It was a strong year for American fiction: J. D. Salinger?s ?Franny and Zooey,? Joseph Heller?s ?Catch-22,? William Maxwell?s ?The Ch?teau,? and Isaac Bashevis Singer?s ?The Spinoza of Market Street? were all nominated. The award went to ?The Moviegoer.? Percy, accepting the prize in New York, framed the novel in terms he had explored in his essays (and which he would develop for the rest of his career): the sickness of modern Western society, the loss of the sense of the self, the role of the writer as diagnostician. Concluding, he made his most vital point indirectly: ?In short, the book attempts a modest restatement of the Judeo-Christian notion that man is more than an organism in an environment, more than an integrated personality, more even than a mature and creative individual, as the phrase goes. He is a wayfarer and a pilgrim.? >> >> Percy was a late starter as a novelist, and Binx Bolling is late coming of age, but Percy?s novel of Binx?s coming of age was ahead of its time. With its slack and offhand protagonist, its present-tense narration, its effortless mix of informal speech, images from popular culture, and frank ruminations on the meaning of life, ?The Moviegoer? is, in my estimation, the first work of what we call contemporary American fiction, the earliest novel to render a set of circumstances and an outlook that still feel recognizably ours. >> >> Faulkner once characterized his approach to writing as ?oratory out of solitude.? Of this approach Percy made a new thing altogether. The solitude of ?The Moviegoer? isn?t the solitude of a rebel or an independent, but that of a person who is alone in a crowd?in a movie theatre or on a sidewalk in the French Quarter. The oratory in the book isn?t that of the Bible or of Stoic philosophy or of a Russian novel but of a voice-over?the present-tense monologue of the person who does not tell a story so much as self-consciously offer a running commentary on life as it passes before his eyes. >> >> The present tense of the narration has acted as a preservative in the novel. The manners and everyday details, so closely observed, are noticeably those of another time. Businessmen (no longer called that) no longer wear hats to the office, and their come-ons to their female subordinates are understood as coercive and manipulative, not perks of the job; the ?silent reproaches? Binx discerns from his secretaries are said aloud. African-Americans are no longer confined to the back of the bus or prized patronizingly for their ?devotion? to white people who employ them; Jewish people are no longer reflexively regarded as figures of displacement and exile. Cinemas are no longer called movie houses, and their managers no longer stand under the marquee offering passersby a ?sample look? on a slow night. The trim certainties of the ?Baltimore Catechism? (the stuff of the novel?s epilogue) are now unknown to even the devoutest Catholic child. >> >> And yet for all that, ?The Moviegoer? seems to describe the way we live now, for its affectless protagonist observes a society whose every aspect seems mediated, contrived, statistically anticipated, manipulated in advance, so that direct experience of life can seem as elusive as the experience of God. >> >> Don DeLillo, a novelist of a generation younger than Walker Percy, spoke of the qualities of the novels that emboldened him to write fiction, and fiction of a particular kind. ?There?s a drive and a daring that go beyond technical invention,? he said. ?I think it?s right to call it a life-drive even though these books deal at times very directly with death. No optimism, no pessimism. No homesickness for lost values or for the way fiction used to be written. These books open out onto some larger mystery.? >> >> Southern, Catholic, ironic, oblique: ?The Moviegoer? doesn?t add up, quite. What is it about? What has come of Binx?s search? What has prompted him to settle down with Kate and embrace everydayness with quasi-religious devotion? ?It is impossible to say,? Binx remarks in the last line of the novel proper. It is impossible to say. And yet ?The Moviegoer,? like its central character, has an inner coherence. Its take on everydayness has the quality of wonder that is the novel?s true subject. It opens out onto some larger mystery, one that we, no less than he, are still trying to solve. >> >> Paul Elie, a senior fellow at Georgetown University, is the author of ?The Life You Save May Be Your Own??a group portrait of Walker Percy, Flannery O?Connor, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day?and ?Reinventing Bach. >> * 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 > * 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... 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