A Political Companion to Walker Percy

6. Confessing the Horros of Radical Individualism in Lancelot: Percy, Dostoyevsky, Poe

6 Confessing the Horrors of Radical Individualism in Lancelot Percy, Dostoyevsky, Poe Farrell O’Gorman Lancelot is Percy’s richest and most challenging novel. It is challenging because its narrator is so beguiling and intelligent, so clearly right about many of the shortcomings of his society, and yet at the same time deadly wrong. To a degree the same might be said of Percy’s two other first-person narrators , Binx Bolling and Tom More. But by comparison with either, Lance Lamar is at once more seemingly sure of himself and more extravagantly flawed. At the same time, his tale ends more cryptically, lacking the brief but hopeful family interludes that close The Moviegoer, Love in the Ruins, and The Thanatos Syndrome alike. The Last Gentleman is the only one of Percy’s fictions to end anywhere near as ambiguously as Lancelot, but this effect is greatly heightened in the latter novel by the obviously problematic nature of its narrator. Properly understanding that narrator depends upon properly understanding Lancelot’s particular genre, which is likewise the key to understanding its fundamental concern with the pervasive influence of radical individualism in the late modern West. Furthermore, the richness of Lancelot might be viewed as a subtle function of—or better yet, response to—that concern. For this is the most substantively allusive of Percy’s novels, written as if to highlight T. S. Eliot’s argument in “Tradition and the Individual Talent ” that great works of literature, like individual human beings, necessarily come into being only in relationship to a constellation of predecessors. 120 Farrell O’Gorman As Percy himself put it, the “strange paradox about writing novels” is “simply this: there’s no occupation in the universe that is lonelier and that at the same time depends more radically on a community, a commonwealth of other writers.”1 Lancelot is written in such a way as to intentionally highlight such relationship, despite the fact that the literary works to which it alludes are generally concerned with the plight of the isolated and alienated individual . My claim here is arguably true of the Arthurian legends’ accounts of the fallen Lancelot himself (though the written accounts of such legends vary widely). It is inarguably true of the many works of modern literature alluded to in the novel, the Shakespearean play whose protagonist is often deemed the first modern man—Hamlet—being one of the most subtly pervasive examples.2 Here I am concerned only with identifying the most crucial of those works. I will argue that Lancelot is best understood as a problematically “confessional” and Gothic novel that is most fruitfully read in relation to two distinct sources: one a short novel, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, and the other a broad tradition of Anglo-American Gothic fiction particularly well represented in the work of Edgar Allan Poe. Percy’s general indebtedness to Dostoyevsky is well documented, and Notes from Underground was the one novel by the Russian master that he chose to teach in his Literature of Alienation seminar, but its startlingly close relationship to Lancelot in particular has never been explored.3 Both Notes and Lancelot were created by authors who embrace traditional Christianity but utilize obsessive and intentionally offensive post-Christian narrators who simultaneously critique and personify what the authors see as the horrors of the radical individualism engendered by modernity.4 Notes was not only the first of Dostoyevsky’s great Christian novels, but also the first to show subtle signs of his familiarity with the Anglo-American Gothic “tale of terror .”5 Indeed, the Russian novelist particularly admired the Gothic fiction of his American near contemporary Poe, whose name is quite conspicuously inserted into the text of Lancelot—a novel which upon publication was immediately recognized as being so indebted to Poe as to openly invite the subtitle “The Fall of the House of Lamar,” after Poe’s famous story “The Fall of the House of Usher.”6 In the second part of this essay I will examine Poe and the Anglo-American Gothic tradition at length, arguing that understanding it is crucial to understanding Lancelot. But I begin with Dostoyevsky because his moral perspective with regard to the unnamed Confessing the Horrors of Radical Individualism 121 narrator of Notes fundamentally resembles that of Percy with regard to Lance. That perspective is clearly rooted in an ancient Christian tradition that predates—and is in...