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

["Parlin, Steven" <PARLINS AT culver.org>]

Nikki, you provide some interesting replies here, and I must confess I am hugely envious that you had opportunity to personally engage Percy (You at least can use his first name!) and discern what was on his mind. That gives you a leg up on some of these thorny matters, I think. However, may I point out a few or your errors and/or misunderstandings here? I may even have to be a tad bit discourteous, for your tone on some points seems a little condescending.

 

First, Aristotle on animal souls: Aristotle never claimed that animals had no “soul”. On the contrary, he argued that all things living had a “soul”. He used “soul” to refer to that actualizing force or principle of the body, but he also classified the soul’s faculties hierarchically, with rationality or thought, only possessed by humans, at the top. (I echo Karey, here, in that we need to be careful to define our terms).

 

Second, the RC Church on animal souls: The Church has never doctrinally denied the existence of animal “souls”. (In fact, JPII spoke about this matter recently when giving voice to responsible stewardship). However, the Church is very carefully discerning about her terms and how they are to be understood when she uses them. For example, the Church’s teachings demonstrate an understanding that words like “consciousness” are, strictly speaking, indefinable, and that the definitions thereof are used with the understanding that they are only metaphors (as all words are) and with the explicit or implicit warning that they must not be taken literally or as finite. Again, I reiterate my point from an earlier part of this thread: this very discussion on the matter of  “consciousness” demonstrates the slippery nature of trying to name things that most likely cannot be named. Who of us on this list really knows precisely what “consciousness” is, after all? While I suppose it is possible that we will one day “evolve”, Theosophically speaking, into creatures that finally know these things in the “absolute”, I must contend that its most likely the case that the mind will remain intractable to us (at least in this life).

 

Third, the Poet as namer: Yes, poet’s name things. Of course. But then, not really. They don’t actually render things completely in form, they can only approximately get at things (like “consciousness”) with metaphor. The can only approximately name things. That’s what poetry is, after all. It’s a chase, a hunt, a quest. And if the “thing” were found, the hunt would be over. Ergo, no more poets. Poets are ever in pursuit of the unicorn, but their attempts to ensnare it are ever frustrated. The thing can’t be caught. And the chase goes on. In fact, Lear’s “nonsense” poetry illustrates my point precisely. And, Percy’s. Percy was interested in how words can be emptied out and the meanings restated. It might be more accurate to say that poets re-name, and then re-name again, and again, and again. Poet’s make available to us those things that get lost because the names didn’t stick. (However, as Percy observes, some words seem to resist this leakiness, like ‘Jew’).

 

Fourth, Percian courtesy: You say that Percy “NEVER raised the slightest banner of mean-tempered virulence but was always the soul of interested courtesy.” Now, I certainly did not know Percy on a personal bases, and your point about him may be quite true, but I wonder. I’m sure Percy was a kind and courteous gentleman, especially in person, and I’ll do nothing here to cast erroneous aspersions about his character. However, it is impossible to argue from his fiction that he was never mean tempered. He was hardly an advocate of pluralistic brotherly tolerance. Instead, his work was nothing other than a brutally violent act of vivisection upon the affairs of this world. He rather bloodily cut things open wide and went in to have a look see. That is precisely why his work is so important. Few other writers have had the courage to be “mean” in this way. No. He was quite mean-tempered about some things and, to the things he found most disagreeable, he was unmercilessly virulent. And, dare I say, he was even a bit rude about some things.

 

(BTW: Jim, Percy wouldn’t have made a distinction in kinds of truth, but that the realm of Truth is accessible to us in different ways. Percy would say that science describes the “truth” that it “sees”, and that literature reveals “truth” as it is experienced. The difference is existential. Whereas science is concerned with observing and collecting data, literature is concerned with revelation. Whereas science is powerless to explain things (like existence), literature is the narration of things, the revealed account of our experience of things (like existence) as they are. For example, the true nature of a relationship, say between lovers, is most accurately revealed in a story that shows the intersubjectivity of their relationship than it is in a data base of information about those two people. It’s fitting to note, here, that Chimps and the like are almost never observed for their “language use” in their own environments but are removed from their own “narratives” to a lab or a cozy home.)).

 

Percy was an advocate of brotherly love, no doubt, but he opposed sentimental notions of it. He never let sentimentality get in the way of stating things are they are –screwed up. He was a fierce diagnostician who, after doing the messy work of exploratory surgery, offered us a prognosis, and then dared to point us to a cure. (For what its worth, I became Catholic in large part because of Percy. Is there anyone else on this list interested in this part of Percy’s work? Or am I the only the only Catholic?)  

 

Fifth, Percy as Jew:  I never claimed that Percy was Jewish in the practical sense, nor was I “boxing him in with the Jews”. Rather, Percy was keenly aware that Catholicism is the full sacramental realization of Judaism. I can even recall from an interview, in “Conversations” I believe, that he said (and I’m paraphrasing), that spiritually we [christians] are all Semites, ie. we are all Jews. His fascination with the Jews was more than mere wistful reverence. He really believed the Jews were the “chosen”. It is true, however, that he never thought himself a good Catholic (though what he meant by that is not at all obvious. Who, after all, is a “good” Catholic?) but his Catholicism mattered to him a great deal nevertheless.

 

 

Steve

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Nikkibar AT aol.com [mailto:Nikkibar AT aol.com]
Sent: Tuesday, December 31, 2002 4:13 PM
To: percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org; daynesherman AT yahoo.com; runner AT i-55.com; atrous AT lsu.edu
Subject: [percy-l] Re: animals, symbols, Gnosticism, Judaaica etc

 

Dear Friends,

I have been lurking about with an increasing Holiday headache for the last couple of weeks over the interesting discussion and have been unwilling to spoil the fun by getting doctrinaire and behaving like a prissy old fart; but now that things seem to be slowing up, let me provide a few biographical observations which I hope will not go so far as to become deconstructionist.

The whole discussion about animals and symbols -- Chomsky, the Chimps in the household with the letter and icon boards, John Lilly and his dolphin language, etc. -- was something that Walker followed with eagerness and interest. We (Walker and I) constantly argued over the matter, Walker adopting with Aristotle and The Church the position that animals had no souls (and there was an end on't) and me adopting quite the contrary position which I had always associated with Theosophical Gnosticism, that the universe (or all-that-is) is in a state of both physical and spiritual evolution. And mixing into this lifelong debate was Walker's stout defense of the notion that animals can't use symbols (despite Chomsky and the household chimps, etc., and Lilly with his investigation of terciops truncatus' click language -- possibly indicating to the contrary).

My own argument inevitably ran to the notion that the symbol as we and Peirce know it, is irrelevant to the debate and that communication and not symbolization is the more proper touch-stone to get one to the concept of evidence of the kind of consciousness that would betoken the existence of animal-souls. Walker always felt that he prevailed in these contests because he could fall back on "show me the symbol-making ability) and that for me was the breakpoint, for while I couldn't show him a symbol emanating from an animal (although with enough funding and sufficiently sensitive and complex computers with enough RAM we may in time learn to talk to the dolphin or translate whale-song) I could always rejoin that he couldn't be certain that animals couldn't and didn't talk to each other; for our uncertainty is grounded in the notion that just because they may have little interest in talking to us, does not logically prove that they cannot talk to one another. In ot her words, in good lawyer-like fashion, I could always demonstrate that an absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence. I can assure you, however that WP was head-over-heels in touch with the problem and took a long and lively interest in it.

For those bewildered by Gnosticism and what it is, search our archives of about five years back using not only Gnostic as a word search tool but Elaine Pagels and to a lesser degree Harold Bloom, whose works we discussed thoroughly. At the end of that discussion I resolved never to get involved in that fight again, as it simply produces (on this channel at any rate) a good deal more heat than light. And the debate seemed fruitless to me for another reason: which was that the RC proponents of antiGnosticism knew a lot less about Gnosticism than I did (and do)  about the Dogma and History of the Roman Catholic Church. What was interesting (and horrible to me) in the discussion was the virulence and mean-tempered attitude emanating at that time from the antiGnostic position, a latter day resurrection of the very same mortal combat which the church won with Valentinian and in winning the victory -- physically obliterated the ancient Gnostics. Pagels refl ects with great eloquence on that fact of this victory and speculates over what the world might be like today, had the Gnostics prevailed at least to the point of remaining alive past the sixth century CE. An additional exploration might be taken up by anyone interested, by reading an enthralling novel on the subject published the last year entitled The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson (Bantam-Random House). An additional observation: in all my many discussions with Walker over these matters, he NEVER raised the slightest banner of mean-tempered virulence but was always the soul of interested courtesy. For further discussion of Gnosticism and what it is, I refer you to Bloom's speculatively intriguing American Gnosticism, but it is not nearly as informative at the basic level of defining terms as the works of Elaine Pagels (The Gnostic Gospels and Gnostic Paul). Google or Amazon will provide a useful bibliography complete with price lists. For a useful chapter on Gnosticism, specifically in the work of Percy (which may however leave you more puzzled after reading it than before) see Eddie DuPuy's book Autobiography in Walker Percy -- if you can find a copy.

I am amused to the point of gentle mirth at the notion that Walker was a Jew ab initio through his conversion to Rome. That in my view is stretching the poetry of language just a little too far. (BTW Poets name things all the time. Just think of Edward Lear's toeless Pobble QED). What Walker would have said himself to this interesting error about boxing him in with the Jews, was that on the contrary he was not a Jew, but a reconstructed bad Presbyterian made over into a bad Roman Catholic. The wistful reverence for Jewry that he displays repeatedly in the novels was just that: very wistful and VERY reverent, which it occurs to me is roughly my own attitude toward Rome but that is BTW; it equals being an indifferent Episcopalian.

A Parthian shot on the subject of the animals. Anyone watching the last season of The Sopranos (and who isn't?) may have some very interesting insights to draw over how Tony's conflicted Catholic attitude to the "Genesis dominion over the beasts" concept works in that most American of myths in its current HBO state of becoming. This agon may be the only thing that draws me back to it in its next season. I am suggesting that for us in the business of the aesthesis of words, myths and stories in the public mind, it's a pivot point well worth thinking about. One could assign grad school papers of 20 K words on it... It could enliven one's grading period to see what results.

And a happy New Year to all.

Nikki Barranger