A Political Companion to Walker Percy

9. Walker Percy's Last Man: Love in the Ruins as a Fable of American Decline

9 Walker Percy’s Last Men Love in the Ruins as a Fable of American Decline Brian A. Smith Walker Percy set out to write novels that examined both obvious and latent maladies in our public life. Laden with allusions to philosophy and addressing the gamut of modernity’s political and social quandaries, Percy’s novels present images of our existence as wayfarers in a profoundly disturbed world. They also stand as near-apocalyptic warnings of where we as a people might soon go. In an essay on the role of the storyteller in modernity, he observed that a serious novel about the destruction of the United States and the end of the world should perform the function of prophecy in reverse. The novelist writes about the coming end in order to warn about present ills and so avert the end. Not being called by God to be a prophet, he nevertheless pretends to a certain prescience. . . . The novelist is less like a prophet than he is like the canary that coal miners used to take down into the shaft to test the air. When the canary gets unhappy, utters plaintive cries, and collapses, it may be time for the miners to surface and think things over.1 This mandate transforms the novelist into something like a physician, looking to diagnose our society’s moral, political, and spiritual diseases before they consume us. Following his own description of this role, rather than simply foretelling the future, Percy hopes to jar us out of our complacency so that his “prophecy in reverse” will not come to pass.2 Given the way Percy’s writings looked ahead to what are now contemporary cultural trends, the amount of critical commentary on the political and social aspects of his work remains relatively small.3 In Love in the Ruins, 180 Brian A. Smith he paints a particularly stark picture of a near-future America’s descent into apparent chaos and ruin. In this effort, he provides us with an alternative to the commonly cited liberal End of History, and suggests a very different image of the “last man” to complement it, a vision that emphasizes our forgetfulness regarding the Fall.4 This essay explores the politics and psychology of Love in the Ruins and argues that Percy’s value to political philosophers lies in the way he traces out modernity’s warping effects upon our already fallen nature, and the consequences this has on our ability to resist self-destructive beliefs and actions in times of crisis. Where human community and sincere religious belief once restrained the extremes of human action, Percy develops a striking account of the way people unmoored from the old order lose their way and, perhaps more important, cannot develop a self-understanding that might lead them into a coherent, healthy life. Because we oscillate between the angelic and the bestial, our peril stems not so much from Nietzschean quiescence but from our alternating extremes of thought and behavior.5 Love in the Ruins presents the reader with a few days in the life of Dr. Tom More, an alcoholic psychiatrist living in Louisiana and “a bad Catholic at a time near the end of the world” (title page). More works and lives in Feliciana parish, a little corner of America torn by political, racial, intellectual , and theological passions. The parish is dominated by the federal medical research facility where More serves and once had himself committed as a mental patient. More’s claim to the fame he desires rests with his invention of a device he dubs the Ontological Lapsometer, a sort of stethoscope capable of diagnosing and later treating the myriad diseases found in the human soul. Although the lapsometer is the means by which More hopes to make men whole again, its use is fraught with peril. While capable of temporarily manipulating the brain’s chemistry to seemingly “heal” the human condition, the device threatens More’s community and the wider world with disaster. Exaggerated as they are, Percy hoped his characters would jar us into a renewed recognition of the dangers we face. While at times he endorses elements of Nietzsche’s assessment of how emotionally stilted, uninspiring, and risk-averse souls could grow to dominate our world, this forms only one part of Percy’s multifaceted diagnosis. Instead of a Nietzschean depiction of bourgeois mass men merely growing flat souled and increasingly alike, in Love in the Ruins Percy provides a rich exploration of the...