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

[RHONDA MCDONNELL <rhonda_mcdonnell AT msn.com>]

I have no answers, but you have reawakened in me a desire to read Palahniuk--as soon as I grade the mountain of essays that I'm presently avoiding. 

--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

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Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2008 08:30:22 -0500
From: gregory.plemmons AT Vanderbilt.Edu
To: percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: Re: [percy-l] Palahniuk

I've always wondered the same. Haven't re-read (or seen) _Choke_ since the movie came out, but there's a wonderful passage on page 151:

Every addiction...drugs or overeating or alcohol or sex, it was all just another way to find peace. To escape what we know. Our education. Our bite of the apple.
Language, she said, was just our way to explain away the wonder and the glory of the world. To deconstruct. To dismiss. She said people can't deal with how beautiful the world really is. How it can't be explained and understood...

"We don't live in the real world anymore," she said. "We live in a world of symbols."

Like Percy also, the protagonist (Victor Mancini) also shares an incomplete medical education. But I've never heard Pahlaniuk comment on Percy in most of the interviews I've read.

Gregory Plemmons


-----Original Message-----
From: percy-l-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org on behalf of Wade Riddick
Sent: Sun 10/5/2008 6:41 PM
To: Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion
Subject: Re: [percy-l] Palahniuk

>List,
>
>Just been reading _Survivor_ by Palahniuk.
>
>Many echos of Percy.
>
>Wonder if he ever read Percy?
>
>Such lines as "It's weird how the name outlives the person, the signifier
>outlasts the signified, the symbol the symbolized." (p.88 _Survivor_)
>speak to a common source.
>
>Any one know if Palahniuk ever spoke of Percy?
>

No, but I just saw _Fight Club_ again the other night and his attack on the
spiritual corrosiveness of consumer credit appears, in retrospect,
materially prophetic.  We seem to be stuck in one of those periodic
economic crises where all the supposedly "sin-less" businessmen have
awakened to the fact that their ticker symbols and other financial
instruments have drifted far afield of the underlying reality they were
supposed to represent.


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