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

[Charles Lowry <lowry.charles AT gmail.com>]

In his masterful psychological study of Percy, Robert Coles (Walker Percy: An American Search) talks of Percy and Dante intermittently for about twenty pages (pp. 213-233), especially links between Lancelot and Purgatorio.  Here is just an example: 

               We have been given four lines from Canto XXX of Dante's Purgatorio as the epigraph--a distinct clue of the author's intentions: "He

          sank so low that all means/for his salvation were gone/except showing him the lost people./For this I visited the region of the dead..."... But 

          Percy quotes from the canto of Purgatorio which T. S. Eliot has judged to provide the most intensely personal and psychologically decisive

          moment in the entire Commedia.

Father Samway has an amusing anecdote about Percy's struggles with Dante (pp. 322-323): "Chiding Walker for preferring Tolstoy to Proust, Shelby recommended that Walker begin anew his effort to read Dante.  If he had done that earlier, Shelby believed, he might have already been inspired to write his magnum opus.  Walker replied that he was more interested in Homer than Dante."

As we have come to expect, there are valuable nuggets in Jay Tolson's biography, especially his citation (p. 383) of a July 4, 1974 letter from Percy to Shelby Foote, the source for the alternate beginning of Lancelot.  More generally, Tolson (pp. 362-363) speaks of a Dantean model for Lancelot: "Without a sense of evil or tragedy or hopelessness--those things over which comedy must triumph--the comic vision may seem shallow and sentimental.  Dante, in order to make a complete commedia, had first to create his inferno.  Percy knew that he would have to do the same.  (And in fact, Percy had Dante very much in mind while writing Lancelot.  At one point he would tell Foote--only half in jest--that he was going to appropriate the famous first lines of the Inferno for the opening of his novel: 'Now in the middle of this journey of our life, I came to myself in a dark wood.')"  Tolson ferrets out another interesting fact (p. 402): "The torment of Percy's internal struggle grew unbearable that summer [1975].  Almost too appropriately, he had finally gotten around to reading Bergin's translation of The Divine Comedy.  As he made his way through the Inferno, he felt a kind of rage and impotent fury building up in himself."  

Since I am generally bereft of any original thoughts of my own, I am happy to transcribe the work of my betters!

Chuck Lowry

Brooklyn, New York

On Sat, Feb 18, 2023 at 12:49 PM Henry P. Mills <wppdirector AT gmail.com> wrote:

Michael and David, thanks for opening a thread on Percy and Dante and how Lancelot reflects Dante. There is obviously more to unpack with the novel in that light.

Love in the Ruins could be added alongside Lancelot. Jessica Hooten Wilson draws parallels between the novel and Dante’s Inferno early on in her discussion of LIR in her book, Reading Walker Percy’s Novels (LSU Press, 2018). She writes,

“Percy pays tribute to the great medieval Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), through whose Inferno Percy was trudging at the time of his drafting of Love in the Ruins. Dante's poem begins, “Midway along the journey of our life, I came to myself in a dark wood.” More’s narrative begins, "Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pines" (LIR, 3), Echoing the passivity of Dante's pilgrim, More also refuses responsibility for ending up where he has found himself. These two narrators awaken metaphorically in their respective dark woods without recollecting how the paths they chose led to their consequent destinations. In Percy’s narrative, like Dante's, the world takes on an infernal quality, and the devil himself will appear as a Jewish salesman. Moreover, as Dante in The Divine Comedy travels to paradise from earth via purgatory, and hell, so Tom "travels continually among the four settings," which Linda Whitney Hobson describes as "heaven [paradise], earth (town) purgatory (swamp), and hell (the pit)." However, in Percy's "postmodern allegory," the pilgrim waivers between the realms, rather than resolutely climb heavenward. The journeying More may also recall John Bunyan’s Christian from Pilgrim's Progress, but unlike these literary ancestors, More does not know that he is on a pilgrimage” (56)….

...The goal of [LIR] is that readers wake up, that we come to ourselves and realize we, like Dante or More, are in a dark wood and have lost the straight way. Percy hopes, like Dante or More, we can begin our ascent towards the eternally promised paradise that Catholics, good and bad, believe in (70)."

As a further angle, we could consider how LIR's Art Immelmann may be a reflection of Satan from the Inferno, albeit as a comedic caricature, alongside Percy’s fantastical invention of the Qualitative Quantitative Ontological Lapsometer and its temptations. Only someone like Percy could come up with the QQOL!

Cheers,

Henry

lsupress.org

On Feb 13, 2023, at 11:19 AM, Beck, David A <dabeck AT iupui.edu> wrote:

Yes. Read Lancelot. He opens with a quote from The Inferno. The book has nine chapters, referencing the nine rungs of hell, etc. At the book's end, Lance is complaining about how cold he is.

-David

David Beck
Senior Lecturer 
English Department
Indiana University and Purdue University at Indianapolis
425 University Boulevard, CA 343-E
Indianapolis, IN 46202
317-278-2550

---

From: Percy-L <percy-l-bounces+dabeck=iupui.edu AT lists.ibiblio.org> on behalf of Michael Martin Serafin <michael_serafin AT hotmail.com>
Sent: Monday, February 13, 2023 10:07 AM
To: percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org <percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: [External] [percy-l] Percy & Dante

 

Did Percy read Dante? I would think so!

Michael Serafin

Chicopee, MA.

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