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Hello all,
I'm sorry I'm a bit late to the party in this discussion. I've been saving the comments for a aday when I had the time to read and think about them. This thread has
been fascinating. I hadn’t realized that the opening of LIR was a reference to Dante until this conversation. I remember first reading it and drawing a parallel to the opening paragraph of For
Whom the Bell Tolls: "He
lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of
the pine trees. The mountainside sloped gently where he lay; but below it was steep and he could see the dark of the oiled road winding through the pass."
The connection
to Dante has been convincingly argued here, though, I 'm not surprised to suppose now that Percy was layering the allusions.
Maybe it's just me, as I thought he was spoofing Hemingway a bit in MG as well with the character of Sam Yerger (although I think that connection to Hemingway is confirmed by others).
I was, however, surprised that Jessica Wooten Wilson identified Art Immelmann as Jewish in LIR. I have assumed (perhaps falsely as I don't mean to question Wilson's scholarship) that the name was
a reference to the German aviator Max Immelmann, since Tom is reading a history of World War I. I guess I don't expect Percy to cast a satanic figure as a Jew, given that he doesn't reflect the antisemitism of some Catholics (as well as so many others). Percy
is adamant always that the Jewish people are God's chosen, as the Old Testament asserts. That does lead me to the other obvious connection in LIR, which is the
Don Giovanni, the Faustian opera that Tom listens to while watching the martins fly to and from their martin house behind his office. That one is such an easy surface grab, though. It's low-hanging fruit, whereas, in LIR, I find this Dante connection
to be more subtle and satisfying.
The commentary on the list regarding Lancelot was another nice illumination. While I had picked up on some of the Dantean elements on my own, I hadn't realized something as basic as the nine chapter division of the book. Now
I'm wondering if Anna can be correlated to Beatrice? I'm thinking that's an investigation worth pursuing, although someone more clever than I am has likely already thought of it! I remember reading somewhere (if only I had Chuck's scholarship or memory and
could find or remember where) that the image created of Lance being blown out of Belle Isle evokes Lucifer falling from heaven, which adds Milton's
Paradise Lost as another intertextual element.
What a lovely way to spend a Sunday morning, musing on Percy and Dante and other allusions to fine literature and art.
All cheers to the whole list!
Rhonda
On Feb 18, 2023, at 2:27 PM, Charles Lowry <lowry.charles AT gmail.com> wrote:
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
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
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
Did Percy read Dante? I would think so!
Michael Serafin
Chicopee, MA.
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