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Re: [percy-l] Part five of the slow read of The Last Gentleman Chapter 5 to 5.6
- From: Doug Brown <wply1223 AT gmail.com>
- To: percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org
- Subject: Re: [percy-l] Part five of the slow read of The Last Gentleman Chapter 5 to 5.6
- Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2025 19:44:22 -0400
Hi Janet - I always appreciate your contributions and questions. You’re an insightful reader of Percy. I’ll do my best to respond to your questions, but with the caveat that much of this is opinion and personal reflection rather than scholarship.
I want to start by recalling a question you asked in last week’s reading. Speaking for Sutters everywhere: I think it’s possible to be a self-indulgent drunk and be insightful at the same time.
1. Did anyone else wonder how our protagonist so easily got himself from place to place? He did not get lost. And there was no GPS to guide him. Somehow he was just where he was supposed to be, this aimless, go with the flow, do-not-make- decisions person. Did this make sense to you?
Thank you! Yes! This sort of thing does intrigue me. I don’t feel like Percy is lazy in his plotting or writing. So I think he’s making some point. Maybe Will’s subconscious is better at doing things than he is consciously?
2. Percy assumes always that his readers know certain words or expressions. There was no internet in the 60's when this book was published.There may have been encyclopedias and libraries. But I sure was glad I had my phone in hand and could look up words often.
Dapple, paltriness, killdeer, WWL in New Orleans, which turned out to be a radio station, cockleburs, satsumas, towhead (not blond), muzhiks, coveys, pari passu, meniscus of snow, fragrant pinon up and down arroyos, chthonic, Catherine wheel, pileated woodpeckers, ich warte. Now you may know some of them, but did you know all of them? I sure didn't.
There are certain writers who I’ve always read with a dictionary on hand. Personally, I prefer the bulky American Heritage dictionary. Percy, Jim Harrison, Ursula Le Guin, David Quammen - keep a dictionary nearby. That said, I think many (not all) of these words and phrases are more familiar to folks from a Southern culture and especially Southerners like Percy (and Will?) who are steeped in history. On the other hand, I have no idea what a “meniscus of snow” might be. Isn’t a meniscus the cartilage in the knee? I don’t know…
3. Did anyone wonder how this almost brain dead person suddenly knew people's names and identities with ease? Knew where he was?
I have lasting effects from a head injury 24 years ago. No kidding. Sometimes I look at friends and can’t remember their names or I see someone around town and they speak to me and I have no idea who they are. Then at other times I know everything with perfect ease. Clear memories of places and people from years ago. So: shrug? I guess it sort of makes sense to me.
We meet his father in a memory, a lawyer, threatened somehow, perhaps because he helps those who are supposed to be shunned. We learn of his sudden horrible death. Could this be the cause of our hero's amnesia? If so, why is it suddenly cured because he is back where he began and why can he so easily recognize everyone he hasn't seen for a long time?
I don’t know who has read The Second Coming and I don’t want to spoil anything. But this event and the effects are further explored in that novel, which is about an older Will and a much better novel, in my humble opinion. I feel sometimes like The Last Gentleman is a bit too oblique.
4. He has many incidents of deja vu. Familiar smells, wrecks of rocking chairs - was he here before? An academy where he visits is a place he knew about. He knew who taught what. Here was more sudden knowledge that does not match the oblivious, amnesiac we have come to know. What did you make of all this?
I think as this novel progresses, we are seeing the progress of Will’s declining mental health. This sort of “is this real or not” technique is interesting as a depiction of his loopiness. Artistically, it’s an interesting approach. Narratively, it can be a bit hard to follow.
5. He meets Val at the Academy and they have a chat. We get Val's story because Barrett is trying to ask her questions. This is a funny episode because Barrett is trying to say appropriate things and they keep backfiring on him. He doesn't seem to like Val. What did you think?
Percy, of course, was a dedicated Catholic who, as Sutter says about Val, believed all of it: God, the history of the Jews, Christ, the resurrection, salvation, the church, the sacraments. But he almost never spoke about these things in a direct, didactic manner. He always comes at it from the slant. I think he portrays Val in a less than heroic light because he cannot simply state his Catholic beliefs outright. He’s maybe making a little fun of his own sincerity and devoutness. Maybe? Just speculating.
6. I loved "The courteous engineer, the last man on earth to inflict a snub..." as a description of our protagonist.
Will is in the center of the Venn diagram of gracious and uncomfortable.
7. Barrett finds Sutter's notes. He is criticizing Val. Sutter we can see is not a stupid man. But what did you think of his assessment of Val and her choices?
This is my hot take: I think Sutter actually respects Val a lot more than he lets on, even agrees with her on many things. He engages more with Val (at least in his notes) more than any other of the characters in the novel because he takes her seriously.
8. He meets more locals and remembers them and asks himself why he ever left.
He finds out there was trouble last night and people were hiding from it. It was probably the same trouble that led to his hitting his head.
He meets Breeze, the negro who runs a restaurant, and he knows him, and he again runs into Forney Aiken, the pseudo negro, who was the driver who picked him up when he hitched a ride when he was trying to connect with Kitty.
Did you have trouble following the story here? Did you think, as I did, that it was awfully coincidental - these meetings anew?
I’m sorry to all the Percy lovers out there. It pains me to speak critically of this writer I adore. But enough with the diversions. Every time Forney enters the story, the story suffers.
9. He meets actors who were in trouble. Forney asks if the engineer could use his influence on the sheriff to intercede and keep these people out of trouble. The sheriff is on his way to arrest them. On a whim he offers them his camper. Did you think that was rational? Even if he wanted to help, what sense did that make? What if they vamoosed with it? Then where would he be?
See comment above. Forney = bad for the story.
10. I loved that Uncle Fannin never called his servant Merriam twice by the same name - Merum, Mayrom, Meerom, Mayrim. But his respectful negro servant answered the same always, "Yassuh."
I loved the little glimpses into the relationship between Fannin and Merriam. They actually rather like and enjoy and respect each other. Fannin wants Will to like Merriam.
11. Sutter's case histories are alternately brilliant and about lewd sex. What do you make of Sutter and his ideas?
While Will seems very intent on understanding Sutter, I think Percy is offering Sutter to us as a sort of broken genius. Percy read a lot of Russian novelists, especially Dostoyevski. I think the various and competing views of life presented in this novel (Sutter, Rita, Val, etc) kind of work like the competing arguments in a book like Brothers Karamazov. Which is Percy? None of them. All of them. ???????
12. Of course when the law found Barrett's trailer with a group of mixed negroes and whites, they assumed that it was stolen. He was generous to let them have the trailer for their escape and didn't want them prosecuted. But he did want them let go and gone by the time he picked up his trailer. What did you make of that?
Forney = bad for story. (Sorry.) In an earlier week of the slow read, I think I offered a purely speculative opinion that Percy and Shelby Foote got a good laugh about this character, and Percy just couldn’t cut him out.
13. Barrett reads more of Sutter's notes which give background to Sutter's marriage and Rita's friendship with Kitty. Sutter is becoming more of a mystery. Or maybe less of one. What do you think?
What a great framing of the question, Janet. I think it’s kind of both, as you hint. Sutter becomes both more and less mysterious, more and less interesting as we learn about him. Will at one point suggested that years down the road Sutter would be sitting in a bar spouting his theories to whoever would listen. Will is less brilliant but more humane. He ends up differently.
14.I loved near the end of section five - "Just between you and I", said Kitty. And without thinking Barrett says, "Just between you and me."
Nothing I say can compete with Leonard’s brilliant, hilarious comment.
15. Sutter's notes now include some observations about Barrett. These I do not understand. Can someone please give me a synopsis of what Sutter is saying here including an explanation of the word immanence?
I find it interesting that the other notes in Sutter’s notebook are framed by autopsies. Is Sutter dissecting Will?
In Lost in the Cosmos, Percy explores this transcendence/immanence thing a lot - and hilariously.
16. Percy often talks of how we behave on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon. Here is Sutter ending his comments with "...In fact my problem is how to live from one ordinary minute to the next on a Wednesday afternoon." Is Sutter speaking for Percy all along?
I think Leonard may have already clarified that that particular comment came from Will, although, as Leonard notes, it can be a little confusing in the text. But the question is a good one: which character speaks for Percy? One of them, all of them, none of them, an amalgam of them?
17. in Chapter Five, part six there is "the locus of pure possibility". "What a man can be the next minute bears no relationship to what he is or was the minute before." This very thought came early in the book in the first few pages.
Thing is, I’m not sure I believe it. I’m not sure Percy believes it. That kind of line has correspondences with Kierkegaard and Camus, both of whom Percy loved. (So do I.) But I am not convinced. Maybe I’m too Southern: the past is not even the past. We are like Michaelangelo or Da Vinci statues that appear to be still emerging from the stone.
18. Sutter picks Barrett up and tells him to visit Jamie in the hospital, that he is very sick.
Yes, go root yourself in this one thing that matters most in the moment.
***
Now I want to have some fun. With Percy there are no accidents. Notice he didn't call him Bill Barrett. He is called Will.
I kept playing with that. Will he or won't he? Does he have free will? Is he willing his actions or absolutely not doing that?
I believe it is no accident that he is called Will and if I tried I could probably find more jokes using his name. Can you find some?
Let's hear from some of you. I look forward to getting some insights.
Will Barrett will bear it. Explored even more in The Second Coming.
I hope this was not too much of a response. I am really loving this rereading of the novel. I look forward to the final thoughts you lovely folks have for the end of the book. Wade, Leonard, Gregory, Janet, Henry, all the other commenters from earlier sections. I love all y'all. Keep it up. Last year I read along in the slow read of The Moviegoer and read all the comments from this team of people, but I did not weigh in myself. So I know there are a lot of people like me out there who are quietly enjoying the conversation. Thank you!
Doug Brown
Asheville, NC
[Paraphrasing from memory]
Will: "Why is everyone drinking in the bar so happy when I can't be? What's
wrong with me?"
"What makes you think they're happy?"
This is the moment of FOMO fallout, the kids would say. Will begins to
understand that his eye is lying to him as he's watching "people" in their
*natural* environment - seeking solace in the "immanence" of the world - and
not getting very far besides the hangover.
The undercurrent of contempt and jealousy/alienation now has a chance to
reverse.
Kids today would say this encapsulates the wisdom about FOMO it takes so many
of them years of flailing around on (anti-)social media to realize.
The influencer culture is an explosion of fin de siècle cults without any
real religion/faith, all revolving around aspirations for material gains.
(The engineer of "money" wants to "fix things." "But what does it profit a
man...")
"The love of the Father is not in them..." _The Bible_ would say. ["If anyone
loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the
world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of
life—is not of the Father but is of the world. And the world is passing
away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides forever for
if you love the world and it passes away, you pass with it." [1 John 2:15-17
NKJV]]
Will is realizing the eye lies to him or there are none so blind as those who
will not see. This relates to Pierce's conception of language as a triad.
Will is a flat rat living in flat land, an engineer navigating in a maze with
2D symbols. But words have a third component that reaches inside another
person's mind and connects us to their interior "soul," if you will.
"Re-entry" perhaps puts us into that orbit that connects us to others through
that bridge of language. Some forms of this empathy/"theory of mind" are
unavailable to the autistic, who tends towards maps, mazes and other
mathematized systems; alcohol is deadening this empathy in the bar hoppers.
In boisterous laughter, they retain the veneer of connection, but the
drunkenness avoids the profound substance of connection. It is, in essence, a
chemical con. Flat rat hunts for his cheese when it's neither his stomach nor
his vision guiding him true. Or booze.
Steve Martin's con man makes a comment closing _Leap of Faith_ that comes to
mind.
"Look. I run a show here. It's a lot of smoke and noise and it's strictly
for the suckers. I've been pulling one kind of scam or another since I was
your age. If there's one thing I know it's how to spot the genuine article
because that's what you've got to watch out for. Not the cops. You can
always get around the cops. But the one thing you can never ever get around
is the genuine article. And you, kid, are the genuine article."
"Are you saying you think you're a fake?"
"I know I'm a fake."
"Well, what difference does it make if you get the job done?"
"Kid, it makes all the difference in the world."
And, no, I didn't find Percy's vocabulary or references very strange. I read
_The Last Gentleman_ just out of high school - either for pleasure or class -
back when the pace of my world allowed for such luxuries and I was plowing
through 30-50 books a year. While others complain about the "forced busing,"
I was in paperback bliss.
Wade Riddick
-------
15. Sutter's notes now include some observations about Barrett. These I do
not understand. Can someone please give me a synopsis of what Sutter is saying
here including an explanation of the word immanence?
I think “immanence” refers to being a part of the physical
world (the environment, society, experience). Sutter seems to be saying that
Will is trying to be happy by becoming part of those realities, and that is
a
lost cause. While I think Will has his own form of alienation, here is where
Percy
criticizes Sutter: he claims to be in a superior world of
“transcendence,” but
with lewd sex as his only way to rejoin the world, and his temptation for
suicide, Sutter is in despair.
16. Percy often talks of how we behave on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon.
Here is Sutter ending his comments with "...In fact my problem is how to live
from one ordinary minute to the next on a Wednesday afternoon." Is Sutter
speaking for Percy all along?
Actually, those words are Will’s (it’s hard to see what
graphs are indented), but you're right: they do come closer to Percy (and Dr.
More), who
advocates an un-alienated existence that involves “re-entering the lovely
ordinary
world.”
17. in Chapter Five, part six there is "the locus of pure possibility".
"What a man can be the next minute bears no relationship to what he is or was
the minute before." This very thought came early in the book in the first few
pages.
I believe that is another Kierkegaard idea related to his
“rotation.” (You who are scholars,
please don’t make fun of me!)
18. Sutter picks Barrett up and tells him to visit Jamie in the hospital,
that he is very sick.
***
Now I want to have some fun. With Percy there are no accidents. Notice he
didn't call him Bill Barrett. He is called Will.
I kept playing with that. Will he or won't he? Does he have free will? Is he
willing his actions or absolutely not doing that?I believe it is no accident
that he is called Will and if I tried I could probably find more jokes using
his name. Can you find some?Let's hear from some of you. I look forward to
getting some insights.
Hahaha…Our protagonist has a great many burdens to carry…will
he bear it?
Thank you, Janet! Love your questions.
Leonard
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-
[percy-l] Part five of the slow read of The Last Gentleman Chapter 5 to 5.6,
honeyjbc1, 07/11/2025
- Re: [percy-l] Part five of the slow read of The Last Gentleman Chapter 5 to 5.6, Percy-L Listserv Manager, 07/11/2025
-
Re: [percy-l] Part five of the slow read of The Last Gentleman Chapter 5 to 5.6,
Leonard, 07/11/2025
-
Re: [percy-l] Part five of the slow read of The Last Gentleman Chapter 5 to 5.6,
honeyjbc1, 07/11/2025
- Re: [percy-l] Part five of the slow read of The Last Gentleman Chapter 5 to 5.6, honeyjbc1, 07/11/2025
-
Re: [percy-l] Part five of the slow read of The Last Gentleman Chapter 5 to 5.6,
Gregory Plemmons, 07/12/2025
- Re: [percy-l] Part five of the slow read of The Last Gentleman Chapter 5 to 5.6, honeyjbc1, 07/12/2025
-
Re: [percy-l] Part five of the slow read of The Last Gentleman Chapter 5 to 5.6,
honeyjbc1, 07/11/2025
- <Possible follow-up(s)>
-
Re: [percy-l] Part five of the slow read of The Last Gentleman Chapter 5 to 5.6,
Wade Riddick, 07/15/2025
- Re: [percy-l] Part five of the slow read of The Last Gentleman Chapter 5 to 5.6, Doug Brown, 07/16/2025
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