Walker Percy

[Leonard Hughes <leonardh6363 AT gmail.com>]

 

Dear Percy People:

I’m afraid I got carried away and talked too much in my first “draft,” so I’m offering a shorter version of the discussion questions I sent you on the busiest weekend of the summer. (Choose which version to address.) If you plowed through the original version, you know how much I owe “Love in the Ruins” and all of Percy’s work, so many of the questions ask for your personal opinions rather than the objective scholarly approach, so here goes:

1) Appropriately, on the country’s 250^th birthday, we’re slowly reading a book that opens with the speculation that the USA may have run out of luck. Do you think it has?

2) Along with Percy’s European philosophical ideas and his Twain-like yarn-spinning, I’ve more recently come to appreciate his descriptive style.  Do you tend to skim description (a friend of mine thinks all description is frivolous) and find it hard to visualize the scenes, or do you find More’s (Percy’s) words a source of pleasure? Please feel free to tell us why, if you’d like, and offer an example or two of passages you appreciate.

2) Thank you, Rhonda, for the shoutout and reference to my feline reputation…and for your comments about student reactions to Percy. What do you all say about Percy’s political “incorrectness,” as it might be called? Rhonda said students objected to “chinaman eyes”; what about Tom’s use of the term ‘’picaninny”? Are Tom’s attitudes (“I’m tired of hearing about the four hundred years”) as explainable as Huck’s use of the N-word? (Doug has already offered a fine response to the issue.)

3) In Percy’s “Notes for a Novel About the End of the World,” he says a contemporary novelist treating the future shouldn’t forecast an imminent violent end of the world but should be concerned with other signs of catastrophe. Evils such as “racism, Vietnam and inflation” should be less concerning than determining if “people are crazy,” and that other signs of evil “portend a different kind of danger.”  Do you think “Love in the Ruins” successfully follows Percy’s “Notes”? Is the danger Tom sees a real problem, more threatening, say, than the undeniably real problem in the novel of a coming race war? I was impressed at Kenneth’s bringing in AI as a problem Percy couldn’t foresee, but one that fits right into the future threats he did see.

4) I confess, as I’ve said before, I love “Love.” Last month, I laughed when I read the essay by my former professor Lewis Lawson facetiously concluding that Tom was “a drunk.” Tom More drinks a little, womanizes, may have politically incorrect beliefs, but he is a hero to me. I’d like to know what you think of him? And why. Does he speak for Percy?

 5) Finally, I’m a fan of Percy’s humor, especially the dark side. What do you think of the humor in “Love in the Ruins”? What does it contribute, or does it detract from the seriousness of the subject? Offer some examples.

Thank you all again!

Leonard