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

[Henry Mills <wppdirector AT gmail.com>]

Note: the following 6/22 post is a re-post of a message that appeared at the bottom of a long section of text for those who missed its commentary.  Further comments on Giraldi's essay or otherwise on Percy are invited.
Henry Mills, Percy-L Administrator


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On 6/22/15 5:41 PM, desmond wrote:

In his reading of The Moviegoer, Mr. Giraldi completely ignores one of its most important thematic threads, i.e. Binx's intuition of his "Jewishness" as a "clue" to his deepest identity, and where that clue leads him in the novel.  Giraldi's simplified interpretation is a serious misreading of the novel (for his own purposes, I suppose).

John Desmond

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On 6/22/2015 11:37 AM, Lauren Stacy Berdy wrote:

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The reader as much as the writer creates the vision in their own mind

If the process of creation does not happen in the readers mind is not reenacted

If the subterranean links and connections  do not link

The work fails

For this reader Born a Jew Dr Percy wants us alert like one of his hawks

His words give us a renewal and a resuscitation for our own lives

Whitman too was religious ( okay a religion not made by a mind) he helped us with our emotional evolution

Dr Percy adds to that self generating order

That creative struggle that all great authors ask of Their readers

I read that article twice and I am sorry that he is wresting so with his demons

catholic or otherwise. 

 

On Jun 22, 2015, at 12:14 PM, Michael Larson <larsonovic AT gmail.com> wrote:

I so hope the world will take him at his word when Mr. Giraldi denies being a Catholic. Otherwise, people might mistake his interests and concerns for those of a real Catholic novelist. As a secular novelist, Mr. Giraldi seems most interested in how his life has prepared him to be an artiste, his boyhood Catholicism being one of those preparations: "An upbringing in the Church has, I suspect and hope, outfitted me well as a storyteller." He likes the instincts Catholicism gave him--but for the purpose of storytelling and not for the purpose of apprehending and conforming oneself to the truth. He even likes there to be a quasi-religious vision to fiction, as long as it is sufficiently amorphous: "A novel should indeed be a groping after some form of the metaphysical, a benediction to unseen powers, the upholding of the mysterium tremendum, those insistent inklings of the numinous."

But the Catholic novelist is most interested in objective reality, and he sees his role as artist to be one of rendering that reality as well as he can. Obviously some novels (and novelists) are better than others, but the vision of the Catholic novelist is neither narcissistic nor subjective (Nor is it proselytizing, as Giraldi claims with regard to Percy and Greene in particular.). No, the Catholic novelist's vision is of something outside of himself, corresponding to divine revelation. His characters may be at any level of understanding (or rejecting) that reality, but the (Catholic) novelist himself has no such freedom. He knows what he knows, and the world he creates, in which his characters live and breathe, must bear a close resemblance to the real one. But this includes immaterial as well as material reality. Mr. Giraldi is fine with being exact about material reality ("my books are flesh-obsessed"), but he wants to keep the immaterial vague, subjective, fuzzy. That's why he's not a Catholic ... and why he should therefore remain silent about the concerns of Catholic writers.

Michael Larson