Walker Percy's Art and Vision

WALKER PERCY'S ART AND VISION 423 5t Augustine, by implication, is treated as a modern in his conception of space and time. He offers the linear progression of a life only in the loosest sense. Augustine's world view is cyclical in that wherever one starts one can only come back to the beginning. Hence, it is irrelevant that he does not refer to his birth until chapter 6. His very being is expressed in terms of the spatiality of God: 'Therefore my God, Iwould not be, I would in no wise be, unless Iwere in you.... You fill all things and you fill them with your entire self.' Whatever happens to him has been preordained, so that Augustine, the paradigm of sinful man, has been placed upon this earth to pray and hope for his salvation. Rousseau is also aware of sin, but for him sin is not an Augustinian inheritance but an injustice perpetrated on him by others. He becomes what society make~ him. The whole purpose of his Confessions is to recapture the lost innocence still buried deep within him. The title of Malraux's Antimemoires reflects his sophisticated scepticism about the possibility of ever recording truth. Time is compressed and expanded, and real and fictional characters coexist in a network artificially ordered by Malraux's consciousness. For Rousseau, his unity means his uniqueness; for Malraux it resides in his relationships within the world so that every relationship expands into a variety of relationships. This is a book full of challenging insights, a welcome addition to the expanding literature on the subject. Walker Percy's Art and Vision JAN NORDBY GRETLUND John Edward Hardy. The Fiction of Walker Percy University of Illinois Press 1987. 318. us $24.95 John Edward Hardy has published brilliant critical books on Katherine Anne Porter, on the modern novel, and on poetry as text and context. His The Fiction of Walker Percy is a most welcome addition to the rapidly growing number of book-length studies of Percy's art. As the title suggests, Hardy has chosen to offer close readings of Percy's six novels, and the very personal readings are both intelligent and rewarding. The book is a series of original and persuasive essays, one on each of the novels - including The Thanatos Syndrome of 1987- in a clear and eloquent style. In general Percy's critics are trying to save him for fiction and deliver him from the existentialists, the psychologists, the Catholics, and the semioticians by focusing on characters, plots, themes, narrative techniques, and style. Patricia Lewis Poteat has helped provoke this reaction by her wholesale rejection of Percy as a philosophical essayist in her Walker Percy and the Old Modern Age (1985) in which she concludes that Percy communicates his ideas much better through fiction than through his profoundly 'confused' philosophical linguistic theories. Hardy's point of departure is that 'before we start trying to interpret Percy's or 424 JAN NORDBY GRETLUND anyone else's work as "existentialist fiction" - or Marxist fiction, or behaviorist fiction, or logical-positivist fiction - we had better see what can be made of it as fictivist fiction.' Hardy contends that 'it is chiefly as novelist that Percy will be remembered, not as language theorist and pundit-observer of contemporary culture, nor yet certainly as theorist of fiction.' This is probably true, and the approach is very tempting for a literary critic, but it is ultimately misleading because it does not take into account how these other fields of interest make the fiction possible and at times are its very backbone. As Percy admitted in a recent Paris Review interview, he is a writer who novelizes philosophy and incarnates ideas in person and place. Percy is now, according to correspondence with me, contemplating a book elucidating Charles Peirce's 'triadic theory.' This is obviously also important for his fiction. In Hardy's defence it should be mentioned that in spite of his declaration to the contrary, he often draws on his knowledge of Percy's theoretical work in his analyses of the novels. In his discussion of The Last Gentleman Hardy dismisses the Kierkegaardian categories as 'more trouble than help' for...