Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

percy-l - Re: [percy-l] LITR Slow Read - Chapter 1 - "July Fourth"

percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Percy-L: Literary, Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Discussion on Walker Percy

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "janetcantor37 AT yahoo.com" <janetcantor37 AT yahoo.com>
  • To: "Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion" <percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [percy-l] LITR Slow Read - Chapter 1 - "July Fourth"
  • Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2014 07:05:41 -0700

Thank you Rhonda, for suggesting this project for the Lists and for starting with your wonderful stimulating opening. 
I am going to offer a long piece of my own, always with the caveat that I am not a scholar; I am merely a reader.


The opening salvo in the first section of LITR is a great tour de force. I am going to comment on details and then end with a bottom line for this section from my perspective.

LITR is the Fourth novel by date that Percy wrote. He dedicated it to Shelby Foote. Shelby Foote dedicated his fourth novel to Percy. The book opens and closes on July 4th, our nation's birthday.

"...the outlook is not so good" is the diagnosis for our country as the book opens. I was reminded of Colin Quinn's one person show, Unconstitutional. It surprised me that Quinn had not read Percy because they were so in tune. When I told him how similar his show was to Percy's ideas, he promised to read him now.
So herewith my thoughts on the first section.

                                              Phrases I liked:

Directly above, a hawk balances on a column of air rising from the concrete geometry of the cloverleaf.

My scalp ...now and then pops a hair root like a dirigible popping its hawsers one by one.

...The Dutch schismatics who believe in relevance but not G-d.

The vines begin to sprout in earnest...(and the whole idea of the menace of nature overtaking the ostensible order that man has contrived over our world through science and politics.) 

The buzzards are lower and more hopeful...(another example of nature threatening order)

(One of my favorites)  ...our private school, which was founded on religious and patriotic principles and to keep negroes out. (Percy is so funny.)

All quiet in front. (a pun?)

In "Love" as it is called....(the Love clinic where volunteers perform sexual acts where others can watch and learn.) Could this also be the Love in the title?

American literature is not having its finest hour. The Southern gothic novel yielded to the Jewish masturbatory novel, which in turn gave way to the WASP homosexual novel, which has nearly run its course. (Percy is so funny.)

The Knotheads enacted a law requiring compulsory prayers in the black schools and made funds available for birth control in Africa, Asia, and Alabama. (Alliteration only makes the joke funnier.)

Paradise Estates, where I live, is a paradise indeed, an oasis of concord in a troubled land.

Some of the patients got better and some of the psychiatrists got worse.

(Describing a diagnosis of one patient with a high reading from his lapsometer)  ...he cannot, so to speak, reenter the lovely ordinary world. Instead he orbits the earth and himself... [and] is destined to haunt the human condition...

Here began the...death by suicide of the Old Western world: white Christian Caucasian Europeans, sentimental music loving Germans and rational clear-minded Frenchmen, slaughtering each other without passion.

                      And those are just a few examples in this opening section.


This book is a partner to The Thanatos Syndrome with an overlap of characters and plot with that novel. so Father Smith and Max Gottlieb are in both, just to name two.
In the same way, The Last Gentleman has some companionship with The Second Coming.

There are many examples of themes, plot points and subjects which are echoed in other Percy novels:

Percy likes to talk about birds and bird formations. Here we have the swooping Eagles, buzzards, and the Martins. In Thanatos bird formations are key in a small plot point. Percy uses the local habitat as a major character all through his novels.
The observation that the mark of genius is the ability to see not one thing or another but the ability to discern connection between the two also appears in Thanatos. As do case histories. As does sodium water. As is someone watching and waiting over all he surveys.
Golf and golf courses figure prominently here and in The Second Coming.
In passing we read about a Creole, and remember that The Moviegoer's Kate's father was a Creole.  Suddenly he tells us, "I've stopped going to movies." Ha - another reminder of The Moviegoer. 
Science vs. common sense is a major theme in his novels.
Catholics, lapsed Catholics, Jews, people using fervor in politics to replace religion, lost souls searching for meaning in the universe, lusting after many women, three in LITR, this is an obsession of most of his male protagonists; blacks and whites and the problem of the negro in the south, these pervade Walker Percy novels.
But above all, Percy is funny. I laugh out loud all the time I am reading all of his novels because of the juxtapositions of the serious and the ridiculous.

Percy uses repetition a lot. It is sometimes hard to decide if it is the fault of his editors or if it is deliberate. How many times did he tell us here that his scalp was tingling with a peculiar emotion? Or how his allergy to egg whites gave him a strange feeling?



Percy uses his life to fill his plot lines. His characters grapple with the same things he has. So there is the physician or psychiatrist who needs to heal himself or winds up in an institution or a prison, reminiscent of his stay in the TB ward of a hospital. Or there is the conflict of choices between the artist, the scientist and the do gooders. There is drinking and Catholicism. Percy's life enriches his writing.

In this first section of the book he presents his lapsometer. As he describes what it can do, it reminds me of psychotropic drugs that can be beneficial, but have so many side effects that other drugs are necessary to combat the side effects. Atomic energy can benefit mankind, but like his lapsometer, in the wrong hands atomic energy can lead to catastrophe.
We get forebodings of what has brought everything to this pass. There is unrest due to a lack of purpose, a breakdown of standards. "Our U.S.A. is in a bad way." Tom's contribution is ..."in the realm of science not sanctity."

LITR examines a world where science thinks it has all the answers. We try to play G-d to fix things, to bring about Eden and we get repercussions we never envisioned. Does the disintegration of societal norms make Tom believe his lapsometer can fix things or does it contribute in the end to that disintegration? See Thanatos for more of this.
I could write reams more, but I think I will stop here and just form a conclusion.

So what do I see as the bottom line in this great first section of the book? I do not look for baddies merely in either the lefties or the knot heads. They are just Percy's way of being an equal opportunity mocker of all things fanatic.
I think the bottom line comes from the end of Percy's essay on the Civil War. (What year did that come out?) Percy celebrates the miracle that our Constitutional Republic survived the horrors of the Civil War. Like Lincoln, he had the realization that we were only 3/4 of a century old in our magnificent and singular experiment. But we were given a reprieve and a second chance to make it last longer. Percy doesn't want us to muck it up and he wrote novels to admonish us to be careful or we might lose it all. 
What he was warning against is that we should not forget our national motto E Pluribus Unum, which announces "Out of the many, one."  (Not, as Al Gore said, hysterically enough, Out of the one, many - oy.)
So Walker Percy is telling us not to imitate the patient who  ... cannot, so to speak, reenter the lovely ordinary world. Instead he orbits the earth and himself... [and] is destined to haunt the human condition...  We should get over ourselves and join the rest, remembering what it is we have to lose; we should stop pushing ourselves into corners and calling the "others" names and separating ourselves from one another, but we should remember that it is important to celebrate together this great country's uniqueness. That does not mean we can't have healthy arguments over what we think works best and we can disagree. But we have to be careful not to paint ourselves into corners and throw away the beautiful, fragile thing we have her in a free country.
This is nothing less than a harking back to Madison in the Federalist Papers where he talked about the dangers of factionalism. It is fine to believe in principles whether you are a liberal or a conservative, a Jew or a Catholic, a black or a white, but do not forget while you are at it, that we are all Americans and lucky to be so.

That is what I believe is Percy's plea in his books. I will go more into detail on this when I cover the last section of the book, Five Years Later, and offer my thoughts on what I believe to be Percy's bottom line.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Now let's hear your two cents.






From: RHONDA MCDONNELL <rhonda_mcdonnell AT msn.com>
To: Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion <percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Sunday, June 29, 2014 5:40 PM
Subject: [percy-l] LITR Slow Read - Chapter 1 - "July Fourth"

I’d like to start be referring to Lauren’s most recent post. In it she makes a great point: Percy is calling for “ALL OF US to look our own selves.”  In the same post, though, she also seems to urge us to not examine his work communally.  That, however, is contrary to Percy’s anthropology. The intersubjectivity of the communal experience is what he was after. So if we read the novel together, no matter how far apart we may be geographically, and discuss what in it speaks to us, what we each think he’s getting at, we can have that affirming moment, where we say, “Yes, yes, that is how it is with me, too!”  That co-celebration was Percy’s main goal.

In his essay, “Notes for a Novel about the End of the World,” Percy explains the novelists role: “The wounded man has a better view of the battle than those still shooting. 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.”

So I turn my thoughts to the opening chapter, partly in light of our previous discussions:

The novel opens with Tom More above the battle, so to speak, and watching and waiting, like many of Percy’s protagonists.  Tom More is a beautifully flawed narrator, and I can’t help but see him in the mold of St. Augustine who prayed, “Lord, grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.”  Tom admits, “My life is a longing, longings for women, for the Nobel Prize, for the hot bosky bite of bourbon whiskey, and other great heart-wrenching longings that have no name.” In fact, he dwells quite a bit on longing in this novel (and his others).  What is this longing all about?  Is it the sensual longings he identifies or is more hiding behind it so that women, bourbon, the Nobel Prize can’t fill it? 

Tom is unique in his society, being neither Left nor Knothead. Instead, he is the odd man out—the true believer who is also a scientist.  He may not be a “good” Catholic, yet, as he asserts, he believes. And his belief is not the watered down belief of Catholicism steeped in scientific humanism. No, he makes the point that he believes the mystery and miracle of it. Tom remembers, “The best of times were after mass on summer evenings when Samantha and I would walk home in the violet dusk, we having received Communion and I rejoicing afterwards, caring nought for my fellow Catholics but only for myself and Samantha and Christ swallowed, remembering what he promised me for eating him, that I would have life in me . . .”  At his present time, though, Tom is no longer taking Communion, which leads to the question: Despite his avowed belief, is Christ in him?  Certainly, God doesn’t rank particularly high on his priority list, coming after women, music, science, and whiskey.

On the list, a lot of discussion has been focused on Knotheads vis-a-vis the Tea Party.  But in this novel, it’s pretty clear that Tom More doesn’t belong to the liberals any more than he belongs to the conservatives.  I imagine that overall, the list leans liberal, so the tendency is to focus on the criticisms of the Knotheads.  But the liberals don’t fare any better in this novel, not from an objective (above the fighting) perspective.  The liberal entertainment—Homo Hijinks—is a pretty good prediction of the direction of contemporary entertainment (e.g., Shades of Gray and the rest of the mommy porn). And, in truth, everyone in the novel is racist. The liberals’ racism might be more subtle, but it is still present.  Is it better in its subtlety?

Most folks who have been commenting lately, whether liberal or conservative, want to claim Percy as being in their camp (if he were still with us).  I’m not so sure, in either case.  If Percy was anything like his character, Tom, he was somewhere in the middle, liberal on some issues and conservative on others.  Perhaps he was more concerned with the individual.  If the sundered selves of modern people could be mended, the rest of it might sort itself out. 
I’ll come to a close, though much more remains to be discussed—what about all of the dropouts in the swamp? What about Tom being the only doctor that will treat the dropouts? What about the vines? What about Charley Parker watching the news?

--Rhonda

"You live in a deranged age, more deranged than usual, because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing."
  
                                    Walker Percy

* Percy-L Discussion Archives: https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/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





Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page