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

["Karey L. Perkins" <karey AT charter.net>]

Mike,

Today it's all about the image.  That's our society today (more dominant in
America than elsewhere a you say below).   The image will make or break you,
not who you really are, or what you really think, or what you'll really do.
That's why Lott had to go -- whatever he actually believed.  I just saw the
movie "Simone" (with Al Pacino) which is a timely comment on our society --
Simone of course is an illusion, and the whole world is in love with her.
(This is Percy's view on our fascination with stars, too.)  This is what
Peter Weir was saying in the "Truman Show" (and btw I love all his movies --
he is a genius, I think, and he predicted the whole "reality show"
phenomenon with the Truman Show, before it ever happened.  Ten years ago,
who would have thought that something like the "The Osbournes" could happen,
ant that they'd make a list of most influential people of the year.)  The
reality show pheonomenon IS the confusion of "real" with "image."   I'm sure
this also relates somehow to The Moviegoer in even more ways if someone can
do that -- right now it's slipping my mind!!

Journalists tend to be liberal so I don't mind the Time, Newsweek, NYTimes
bias as much as someone else might.  I can see why it would bug you.  My dad
is retired military, as conservative as they come (and despite it all a
great guy) and he watches that horrible Irish guy on TV (Someone O'Reilly?)
that invites his liberal guests on just to badger them and interrupt them.
Ick.  He doesn't care what they have to say, or to really discuss things,
just to get his point across that his guest is "wrong."  I have to leave the
room.  That's the problem with liberal/conservative or Republican/Democrat.
It shouldn't be about the label, it should be about exploring the issue.

I am a converted Catholic -- Steve asks if anyone else reads Percy because
they're Catholic.  I first read Percy at 18, before I became Catholic, and
loved him -- for what he had to say about man (i.e.: humanity).  He totally
GOT it, as far as I was concerned.  I became Catholic at 26 -- when I was
attending a Baptist seminary, with the eventual goal of teaching theology
(so of course I quit the seminary though really didn't have to!)-- but my
becoming Catholic was not because of Percy (i.e: it was less of a causal
relationship than a coincidental or synchronistic one), or not so much due
to the theology, but because of the Catholic mass -- because of the
sacraments.  I was blown away by the Eucharist.  The Catholics have
something in the sacraments that we need -- and something happens in the
sacraments that the Baptists are missing -- and Percy totally GOT that too.
First few pages of Love in the Ruins.  But I never would have known had I
not gone to Catholic mass. I knew immediately I would be Catholic for the
rest of my life. Of course an anthropologist can examine what the sacraments
do on a psychological/cultural level, but I think something metaphysical is
going on there.  (Something triadic?)

BTW, converted Catholics are like converted non-smokers -- much more rabid
in their beliefs than cradle Catholics or those that never smoked!!  It's
been twenty years for me so I've somewhat mellowed.

I think Percy gets Man (as in men and women), but doesn't get women as a
gender.  As far as David's question, is it because of abortion -- well
that's opening up a can of worms, isn't it!!  I think one day I'll write a
post entitled "A View of A View of Abortion, with Something to Offend
Everyone."  Suffice it to say, it's not the black and white issue most
conservatives (usually middle class to wealthy white males -- and not to
state the obvious, but the very people willing to legislate the act would
never actually have a need for an abortion) make it out to be.  They're sort
of like Marie Antoinette saying:  "Let them eat cake."  But that's not the
reason Percy doesn't "get" women.

The reason I don't think Percy understands women is what I'd said in an
earlier post -- I thought I picked up a madonna/whore complex in his
characterizations of women.  I asked, no one responded, but now, reading
Tolson's biography, and the Uncle Will chapter, that view is somewhat
confirmed -- Tolson attributes Uncle Will's lifelong bachelorhood to his
inability to reconcile the "image" of the pure women he admired (whom he
could not be sexually attracted to) with the sexy women he could not love.
I think there's a little bit of Uncle Will in Walker -- not so bad that he
never married of course, but just look at his characterizations.  I
attribute this to his conservative Southern upbringing.  Also, on a
psychological level, I think the fact that there were three boys and a
distant mother contributes to that phenomenon.  I don't mean this
disparagingly at all -- I've always known who Percy was, and sometimes been
surprised that I chose him to study  (why not Flannery O'Connor?  or Maya
Angelou? both of whom are wise ladies who also "get" it) but I think it's
because he really has something to say about being a human being in the
modern world, something that I'd like to say if I could.

What I'm trying to figure out now is if his language theory is as "on the
money" as his understanding of man in his novels.

KP




----- Original Message -----
From: Mike Frentz
To: percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org
Sent: Sunday, January 05, 2003 8:45 AM
Subject: Re: [percy-l] AND...just one more post...


Karey,

You (or Newsweek rather...) presented a classic Peicean Triad of the sort:

                                            Republican (Representamen)
                                                   /    \
                                                 /        \
                                               /             \
                                             /                 \
                                           /                     \
    Conservative (Semiotic Object)-------  "ill-dressed, unintelligent and
slinking --
                                                                   the sort
of people who lynch Negroes,
                                                                  attend
revivals, and fight and fornicate
                                                                  in the
bushes afterwards  (Interpretant)

Whether Will Percy "meant" it *that* way or not, that's how it was presented
now (Mahh Deahh,
that trahangle was from the sixties, but..., come to think of it, it *does*
appeah to be in
pretty good shape, Ah think ah'll just use it anyway...) -- Wade's earlier
comment about
not getting a balanced view on FOX struck me curiously -- no argument, it's
just that I would
have put the NY Times, Wash. Post, NPR, ABC-NEWS, CBS, etc. *at least* no
lower on his list.

If you've ever attended a non-PC event (or, equivalently, watched it on
C-SPAN [Yaay for C-SPAN!!]),
and then seen how it was reported by the talking heads afterwards, you have
no problem seeing how
prevalent media bias is.  Case in point:  the pro-life march in
Washington -- typically ~100,000 of the
nicest people you'd ever want to meet vs. 199 multi-pierced/tattooed
strange-ohs [that you'd blanch if they
showed up to babysit your kid..] + 1 "normal person" as a frontman.  Normal
person gets more air-time
than the 100,000.    Consistently.

Second case in point:  I'll bet you that the number of votes that Alan Keyes
got in the Republican primary
correlated very strongly to the number of Republicans who actually watched
the debate on C-SPAN.  Phone calls
afterwards were running 2 out of 3 enthusiastically in favor of Keyes.  When
you read about the debate the
next day, it was hard to believe anybody but McCain and Bush actually
particpated (but then the media were
mystified by the "surprising showing" of Keyes in the actual primary).

My 2c on Percy:  people trying to "understand" Percy without first trying to
understand THE Catholic view of the world must
be fond of fool's errands -- it would be very hard to be successful with
that approach, IMHO (and the Catholic
viewpoint is *probably not at all* like what you think it is -- especially
if you're still believing in NY Times' type fairy tales).
An excellent primer on the Catholic worldview is Frank Sheed's "Theology and
Sanity".  Distilled Aquinas and Augustine.  It
may be a good study aid for students of Percy.

I'm sure your brother-in-law is very bright, but he also has the distinct
advantage of having a media without nearly as much built-in agenda
(that's why things that are obvious to him, many Americans are still in the
dark about..)


Mike

Karey L. Perkins wrote:

Mike --

I wasn't talking about politics, or Republicans, or Democrats -- Newsweek
was.  I was talking about RACISM, and Percy's attitude towards that.  I
agree Percy was interested in justice and not labels.  But Percy, and his
family, are well-born, wealthy, Southern, aristocratic and interested in
preserving the interests of that world -- which seemed liberal on race
because it wanted to keep the black in Mississippi, and happy to be in
Mississippi, but had a kind of paternalism that was, in the end,
self-interested.  While there was certainly altruistic, compassionate, and
"justice" motives in the Percy family's fight against the KKK and those of
that ilk, it was also mixed with self-interested motives -- nothing (and no
one) in REAL life is plain, simple, and purely black and white.  We're all
shades of gray.

Read Tolson's biography, Ch. 3, "Uncle Will," and what great-uncle LeRoy
asked Uncle Will to do to the black refugees in the flood of 1927.  Percy
was more progressive, but if you are equating my terms of
progressive/liberal with the Democrat then that is a mistake.  A liberal
from Mississippi is hardly a liberal.

I visited my sister's family (in England) for Christmas.  My brother-in-law
is British (and a professor at Cambridge University and quite bright) and he
said he was thoroughly confused by the Newsweek article.  I asked why, he
said because the American parties switched in the middle, (as did the Brits
also with their parties), so Republicans and Democrats became something
different than what they were -- hard for him to follow.  Read the
article -- it's good.  And worth reading, if only in that it describes the
world, culture and values that Percy, and Strom Thurmond, and Trent Lott
were given.  The Republicans HAD to get rid of Trent Lott -- regardless of
whether he still believed in the "Dixiecrat" platform of 1948 that Strom
Thurmond was running on -- because he propagated the image of the racist
Republican that would be the death toll of the party.  I personally happen
to believe Trent Lott is a racist and meant what he said -- as you see in
the next week's news, where Lott said he learned a lesson from this -- that
he needed to change -- though wished he hadn't had to learn it that way.

By the way, on a personal note, I vote against Republican on pretty much
anything.  That does not mean I think Percy would at all, nor was I implying
that.  But I differ from Percy on a lot of things, including a lot of
political issues, including also his attitude towards women, but not at all
on his attitude toward race.

Karey



----- Original Message -----
From: Mike Frentz
To: percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org
Sent: Friday, January 03, 2003 6:01 PM
Subject: Re: [percy-l] AND...just one more post...



Karey L. Perkins wrote:

In this case, Newsweek quotes from Will's Lanterns on the Levee to describe
the liberal/progressive part of the state in contrast to the more
conservative/backwards northern Mississippi, with which Lott associates
himself.  Will Percy describes, and the article quotes him, that part of the
state as "ill-dressed, unintelligent and slinking -- the sort of people who
lynch Negroes, attend revivals, and fight and fornicate in the bushes
afterwards."

However, Newsweek misses the better quote in capturing a Percy opinion --
Walker Percy's himself.  His Signposts essays dwell considerably on racism
and segregation -- timely of course considering the era of their writing --
and the Life in the South section was immensely illuminating to me, as a
non-Southerner, on the problem Southerners had with integration (which Percy
was for, of course).  His discussion of the fact that the South had no
public space probably goes as far to explain the problem as any I've heard
yet.
I think the South's history of racism, his family's political heritage of
political activism and "noblesse oblige" as he himself calls it, northern
Mississippi's "backwards" political agendas that his southern-born relatives
spent their lives battling, the fact that just a few years ago the Germans
just barely failed attempt to decimate an entire race (and the U.S. did not
enter the war to save the Jew, but for other interests), the heated racial
conflicts and out-and-out riots of the 50's/60's, and the fact that much of
this was playing out on his home state's front yard, such as James Meredith
entering U. of Miss. -- all of this caused Percy to be intensely concerned
about racism.

Hogwash.  I can't help but feel sometimes that peopleon this list believe
that if Percy were alive today he would be a Democrat.  Even I was a
Democrat (Deathocrat, Damnednocrat..) around the time Percy died.  Percy
certainly did not fit the demographics of the current Democratic party if
you can believe the color chart from the 2000 election (big city, Northeast
or Pacific coast).  And his beliefs were adamantly pro-life (e.g. Signposts
340) (which is why I had to finally switch parties in '92, also flushing
100+ years of still rabid Democratic heritage down the potty).

 I think Percy was most interested in justice, not political labels ("If you
want peace, work for justice"  JP II). That's why Catholicism was so
important to him.  Catholicism is about the pursuit of truth, wherever it
goes, rather than wherever it "was".  (BTW, most fervent Catholics are now
Republicans if you believe the polls)

 The Republicans also did not start the Civil War to free the slave, yet
they did.  Go figure on Lott's remark, it is certainly not representative of
the Republican party.  Good riddance if there was any truth to it.  Nor are
the Democrats symbolic of progressive thinking (anymore) -- they now
represent the special interests that are the same bigoted special interests
that Percy's ancestors fought.  Only the color has changed.


Mike