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

[Henry Mills <wppdirector AT gmail.com>]

Thanks for your great comments, Greg.

I'm restarting this thread with a chapter heading for the subject line, 
so all can follow along more easily.  Not all list members are able to 
follow discussion in "real time."

Best,
Henry Mills
Percy-L Administrator


On 7/21/14, 11:56 PM, Plemmons, Gregory wrote:
> Hi, y'all,
>
> Below are some thoughts I had on reading this section:
>
> Percy’s July Third section takes place almost exclusively within the confines 
> of the medical school. After a relatively brief and seemingly uneventful 
> section with Tom’s mother, action/machination returns, this time on an stage, 
> which is often a useful device itself (the play within a play...)
>
> I wondered about Percy’s choice of the Pit as the setting for this section. 
> What do others think? He seems to use it to great effect here. Such 
> amphitheaters are still fairly common in educational settings. How much of 
> what we consider education is entertainment, and vice versa? Does it matter? 
> Did everyone else find Mr. Ives to be quite a sympathetic character? The 
> public inquisition to which he is subjected here is quite humiliating, and 
> yet while Tom initially seems sympathetic, defending Mr. Ive’s defecation and 
> mutism, how much is done out of empathy, and self-recognition? How much is 
> done for spectacle? Tom is quite the critic of how gladiatorial the whole 
> guise of academic “sportsmanship” pretends to be—and a brilliant 
> satirist--yet I feel finds himself completely swept up in the game, at times. 
> Is it humanly possible to remain objective and aware of the Game? (and what 
> would Percy think of Dr. Phil…)
>
> At one point (p. 219) Tom says “students are, if the truth be known, a bad 
> lot.” Does he believe this? In this section, the teachers act just as 
> juvenile—is there hope for future generations, or are we essentially trapped 
> in the human condition? I keep thinking of the young hippie couple with the 
> baby, on Honey Island…are they lost, or simply Hope?
>
> At one point, Tom has a fleeting moment of insight—“the thing to do, it 
> occurs to me halfway down into the pit, is to concern myself with the patient 
> and what ails him, and forget the rest”—which I think is a shining moment of 
> grace—but it seems to me that the challenge is how to forget the rest—is it 
> humanly possible, without the Gift? Without Grace?
>
> Although Percy has never been pegged as a traditional Southern writer, at 
> least in the Faulknerian sense of place, I’m always struck by his keen 
> awareness of the nuances of each region and his depiction of Mr. Ives 
> here—Mr. Ives seems curiously displaced, yet is most likely typical Everyman 
> for your average 1960’s middle-class Southerner. Ives, we’re told, is from 
> Tennessee, but lived for forty years in Hartford, Connecticut as an insurance 
> controller before his wife died (shades of Doris/Catherine? 
> self-identification?), and he desires to return home to Tennessee (aptly, 
> Lost Cove--Lost Self?). I’m sure whole essays have been written on this 
> choice, and What is Home, and what is Self (as someone pointed out earlier, 
> the Mall-ification of the South)…but it seemed at least worth a comment here. 
> Can he truly go home? Was he there to begin with?
>
> Mr. Ives: “his monkey eyes snap”—I couldn’t help but chuckle, and wonder about Percy’s 
> word choice here, having spent the weekend not too far from Dayton, Tennessee—home of 
> the Monkey Trial—(which is not too far from Lost Cove, either—if any of you are 
> wondering, which is a real, not fictional place). Both of those locales are fairly 
> close to Sewanee, where Percy's family had property, I'm told, and where he spent some 
> time. Nearly a hundred years later, evolutionary biology is still being debated here 
> (and nationally) and I continue to be fascinated by the constant intersection/conflict 
> of science and faith. Interestingly, of note, here in Tennessee a rebuttal 
> “play/musical” has been written to counterbalance “Inherit The Wind”--entitled 
> "Inherit The Truth" (and the Creation Museum up the road in Kentucky is 
> erecting a life-size replica of Noah’s Ark). At least in my neck of the woods, it seems 
> we need Percy’s voice more than ever…the center cannot hold...
>
> Greg