Apocalyptic Patterns in Twentieth-Century Fiction

Three: The Ultimate Journey: The Quest for Transcendence and Wholeness in the Apocalyptic Worlds of Walker Percy, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo

37 C H A P T E R T H R E E The Ultimate Journey The Quest for Transcendence and Wholeness in the Apocalyptic Worlds of Walker Percy, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo How does a twentieth-century novelist dramatize the quest for transcendence and human wholeness in a secular apocalyptic world? That is the question we will explore in a reading of a modern novelist, Walker Percy, and two postmodern writers, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. What is often noted about these three authors is that they have a shared literary sense of irony and satire, but not so often noted is their common religious background in Catholicism, which influenced their choice of the apocalyptic genre in several of their novels. Walker Percy (1916–90) was born in Birmingham , Alabama, into a Protestant family with deep Southern roots. He attended the University of North Carolina, where he studied science, then earned a medical degree at Columbia University. Afflicted by tuberculosis, he spent much time reading Kierkegaard and existentialist philosophy during his period of recuperation, which led him from scientific agnosticism to a conversion to Catholicism in 1947. His apocalyptic novels are Love in the Ruins (1971) and The Thanatos Syndrome (1987). Thomas Pynchon (1937– ) was born and raised on Long Island, attended Oyster Bay High School and Cornell University, where he studied under Nabokov and graduated with a degree in English in 1958. He was raised a Catholic but later called himself an agnostic. He has led a reclusive life while producing several prizewinning novels. His first novel to make use of themes from Revelation is The Leigh.indb 37 Leigh.indb 37 7/25/2008 9:31:31 AM 7/25/2008 9:31:31 AM 38 Apocalyptic Patterns in Twentieth-Century Fiction Crying of Lot 49, published in 1966. Don DeLillo (1936– ) was raised in the Bronx, attended a Catholic high school and Fordham University, graduating with a degree in communication arts in 1958. After working as a technical writer, he devoted himself to full-time fiction writing, publishing several novels before his apocalyptic masterpiece White Noise in 1985. With their shared Catholic backgrounds, these three novelists find and create apocalyptic patterns in contemporary life in a way consistent with the Catholic emphasis on “realized” eschatology, with only intermittent suggestions of a future final judgment. All three focus on the ultimate journey: the quest for transcendence and wholeness in a world filled with signs of apocalyptic collapse. The Ultimate Journey in Two Novels by Walker Percy In an important essay composed around the time he was writing Love in the Ruins, Percy declared his interest in writing a sort of “prophecy in reverse,” a novel of the future warning readers about his “ultimate concern with the nature of man and the nature of reality” in the America of the 1960s. Admitting that a novelist with such concerns could be called “philosophical ” or “eschatological,” he went on to declare: “It is fitting that he should shock and therefore warn his readers by speaking of last things—if not of the Last Day of the Gospels, then of a possible coming destruction, of a laying waste of cities, of vineyards reverting to the wilderness” (Message 104). As he called attention to the “profoundly disquieting” fact that “the triumphant secular society of the Western world, the nicest of all worlds, killed more people in the first half of this century than have been killed in all history,” he announced his concern as a novelist with “the radical questions of man’s identity and his relation to God or to God’s absence.” He went on to acknowledge his explicitly Christian background: “It is probably an advantage to subscribe to a world view which is incarnational, historical, and predicamental . . . to see man as by his very nature an exile and wanderer . . . . And if it is true that we are living in eschatological times, times of enormous danger and commensurate hope, of possible end and possible renewal, the prophetic-eschatological character of Christianity is no doubt peculiarlyapposite”foranovelist(Message111).SincehefindsthatChristenLeigh .indb 38 Leigh.indb 38 7/25/2008 9:31:31 AM 7/25/2008 9:31:31 AM The Ultimate Journey 39 dom has worn out its vocabulary and lost its moral leadership (especially by its mistreatment of African Americans), the Christian novelist, in the tradition of Flannery O’Connor, must “call on every...