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

[Henry Mills <wppdirector AT gmail.com>]

Here is a quote I have set aside as a Percy favorite.  Perhaps it sheds some light? I can't say exactly where I transcribed it from sometime in the past, but I believe one of Percy's interviews.

"My theory is that the purpose of art is to transmit universal truths of a sort, but of a particular sort, that in art, whether it's poetry, fiction or painting, you are telling the reader or the listener or the viewer something he already knows but which he doesn't quite know that he knows, so that in the action of communication he experiences a recognition, a feeling that he has been there before, a shock of recognition. And so what the artist does, or tries to do, is simply to validate the human experience and to tell people the deep human truths which they already unconsciously know."

Cheers,
Henry

On 5/27/15 5:25 PM, Karl M. Terrell wrote:

Quote-accuracy aside, this an interesting idea from both Percy and
O¹Connor, and reminds me of an observation I once heard or read, somewhere
‹ my spin of which is: One sign of a capable mind, or of at least a
careful mind, is the ability to distinguish the things you don¹t know.
Far too many fail to understand this, and get themselves in all kinds of
trouble.  

Percy and O¹Connor, though, speak to a higher ambition ‹ the undertaking
of a search to identify the things we know, but as to which ‹ while stuck
in our everydayness ‹ we didn¹t realize we knew, or were perhaps unable to
know.

Karl

On 5/27/15, 4:41 PM, "Skip Collins" <skip.collins AT gmail.com> wrote:

"Fiction doesn¹t tell us something we don¹t know, it tells us
something we know but don¹t know that we know."

As with many pithy quotes found on the internet, I believe that this
is a paraphrase. I suspect the original source is what Percy said in
his interview with Zoltan Abadi-Nagy, which has been edited to be more
quotable.

Another famous quote that I came across, attributed to Flannery
O'Connor, seems like it might have influenced Percy's thinking:
"I write to discover what I know."

This is supposedly from The Habit of Being, a collection of O'Connor's
letters that Percy must have read. But when I went on Amazon to find
the quote, it did not show up in the search. It too appears to be a
cleaned up version of a less quotable passage from a letter she wrote
in 1948:
"I don't have my novel outlined and I have to write to discover what I
am doing. Like the old lady, I don't know so well what I think until I
see what I say; then I have to say it over again."

This is more about her process of writing than some general theory of
coming to discover what she already knows through writing.

I would love to be proven wrong about both the Percy and O'Connor quotes.

-- 
skip
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