Walker Percy

["Ketner, Kenneth" <Kenneth.Ketner AT ttu.edu>]

Dear folks: 

LITR is well-packed with issues, so many  and such effective ones, that it almost belies WP’s warning against novels that require a textbook to appreciate. I’m fascinated with many of those particular ones, especially the lapsometer, and good ole Art Immelman. Consider the latter.

1. Note it is: Art Immelman.
2. Art is also closely genetically related to the champion deal-maker and helpful friend of Dr. Faustus (I forget his or her name).

The one whose initials are A. I. in this story is presented with a set of abilities and excuses: those strike me as parallel to what we are now encountering with AI, the computer thing. A comparison of Art’s promised capacities and unexpected-lurks, with the practice and promises of AI, would be an interesting undertaking.

Searching A.I. (ancestors of ole Art hisself) on my computer reveals a message that the surname “Immelmann” in German comes out as “honey man.” Also there is the famous aerial combat maneuver from the First World War called the “Immelman Turn” that goes like this: you are being followed by an enemy airplane; you raise your aircraft into a Half Loop, but at the top (instead of completing the loop) your aircraft is upside-down (Did you fasten your seatbelt?) you execute a half barrel-roll, such that now you are right-side-up above your follower and going in the opposite direction. From such a position it is easy to outmaneuver the following enemy, who then is militarily discouraged. And the “doing thereof” thereby is so “Artful.” 

And, Art is (Not!) such an artful golden good-deal-maker that everything through a kind of destiny, becomes screwed-up from his activities. One is inclined to think that the arts of citizen Art Immelmann when duplicated in actual real social conditions, will produce actual bad social outcomes analogous to those in the novel. Percy admitted to being a diagnostician; would “prophet” be more accurate?

The Lapsometer is quite a device. As a literary item it has a lot of potential. Is it so far from reality these days? Yes, in some ways, but No, in other ways. A laboratory on campus here (also elsewhere) is developing “mind controllable artificial limbs" (think Star Wars in which Luke loses his natural hand, and gets an even better thought controllable electromechanic/computer member). A survey of other contemporary labs can show progress toward various components needed for the first fully capable existing prototype, no doubt thoroughly supplied with the latest AI software.

A big feature of LITR is that its visions are closely reflected in present life. 

Kenneth Laine Ketner

P.W. Horn Distinguished Professor Emeritus

Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism

Texas Tech University

Lubbock, TX 79409-0002 806 742 3128

School of Nursing

Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center

https://www.depts.ttu.edu/pragmaticism/

http://www.kenketner.net

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From: percy-l-request AT lists.ibiblio.org <percy-l-request AT lists.ibiblio.org> on behalf of RHONDA MCDONNELL <rhonda_mcdonnell AT msn.com>
Date: Tuesday, June 30, 2026 at 22:08
To: percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org <percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: Re: [percy-l] Love in the Ruins-Discussion Questions for "July 1" Chapters 1-5

This email originated outside TTU. Please exercise caution!

Dear friends,

I find myself woefully behind this summer (much like last summer). Somehow time speeds by—I blink and a month has passed. Reading back over our discussion, this bit from Leonard, the intrepid cat-dipper, jumped out:

One thing that hangs in my balance is how Tom’s smart-aleck comments (“The older Negroes are mostly trifling and no-account, while the young Negroes have turned mean as yard dogs.”) may have hurt Percy’s reputation.

I

During Covid, I read Love in the Ruins with a book club. The younger readers were quite squeamish about much of Percy’s language. They really went around regarding Tom’s “chinaman eyes” claiming that Percy was lazy in his descriptions, relying on stereotypes, etc. etc. I suppose the varying descriptions of black characters also bothered them, but what I remember was their objection to “chinaman.”

If his reputation suffers in regard to such things, then he won’t be alone. Of course it’s still rather in fashion to jettison all the dead white guys in favor of dead people of other cultures and genders. In the long stretch of history to come, we’ll either lose everything that reveals how people once acted and thought — goodbye Shakespeare and Faulkner and Hemingway and all the rest — or people will get over themselves a bit. I’m hoping for the latter. 

As to Chuck’s fine questions, one that inspired much thought for me was the function of doctors. I’m not sure what they might symbolize — any ideas anyone? But Tom’s interactions with Max and Colley are interesting. Tom is both colleague and patient — a role both Max and Colley are eager for him to return to but that he resists. Max primarily behaves as Tom’s doctor, though Tom is approaching him as a colleague. The tension caused by that reveals that Tom knows he’s not well, and he also knows he ought to shut up about the vines. 

With Colley, it’s something else entirely. In this character, Percy seems to be acknowledging that for blacks to have “equal” opportunity, they must put in exceptional effort and achieve far more than their colleagues, who are free to be average white guys when Colley must be a super-negro. The rift between them, according to Tom, arises when Tom notes that Colley is a self that is practicing at being a self that is not its self (or something like that). Colley is offended because he is doing what he must. He cannot be a black Alabaman but must be an Amherst man. He must sound like his colleagues, but even more like them than they themselves sound. Now we call this code-switching, and Colley is miffed because Tom has “found out” the secret of being a successful black man and exposed it, if only to Colley himself. Tom, however, didn’t see what Colley was doing as something particular to a race of people; instead it’s part of the human condition.  Tom meant no offense, but Colley is, if not offended, suspicious of Tom and his intentions. Tom relaying the overheard conversation about the planned kidnappings and school on Honey Island also seems like an opportunity for getting crosswise. Why does Colley need to know? Because he’s a potential victim? Because he’s black? Because of both elements of his identity? But Colley keeps his own council. 

More later,

Rhonda

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From: percy-l-request AT lists.ibiblio.org <percy-l-request AT lists.ibiblio.org> on behalf of Leonard Hughes <leonardh6363 AT gmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, June 13, 2026 8:38 AM
To: percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org <percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: [percy-l] Love in the Ruins-Discussion Questions for "July 1" Chapters 1-5

 

Chuck!

 

Thanks for your insightful questions—and your opening notes.

 

1.     I had forgotten how very funny parts of this novel were….

 

Loved your appreciation about the book’s humor! Always something to LOL about…in this section it was his comment about the English freeloaders: “They spoke of Hindoo reverence for life, including cattle, and fell upon my steaks like jackals.”

 

…..a member of the dreaded caste of “general reader.”

 

And thanks for bringing a bunch of us into your intro, “General Reader.”

 

I don’t know who I am in that context (officially designated as “Independent Scholar” in a literary journal, “Community Editor” in my last real job, “Merch Doctor” on the road later with Lewis Black and “Notorious T.A. and Cat-Dipper” on a letter from Lewis Lawson, my “director,” after I’d written a column about cats).

 

 

2 and 3. ….let your comments range as widely as you think desirable or necessary.  You are not bound by my schema!

 

As you’ll see, I range pretty widely.

 

Ad res nostras:

 

* These five chapters contain several bits of action…This long introduction leads to an observation about the only character that connects most elements of this narrative, as Robert Coles puts it, a “wonderfully antic instrument,” the Qualitative Quantitative Ontological Lapsometer.  What is this thing?....  of what is it a symbol?

 

Great summary of the section! I wish someone would invent a lapsometer.  Before I read much about existentialism or Kierkegaard, I had been thinking about the relationship between the material world and the mental one as I studied literature and aspired to write. I contemplated why “so much depends on a red wheelbarrow” and how poets “give to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.”  The pop culture mid-century was promoting the spiritual (or similar stuff) and rejecting the material. When a best friend renounced the material life, buried his motorbike and joined an agricultural commune, I felt guilty that I was too chicken to follow him. But I tried to find a reconciliation between the spiritual and material in literature. “Love in the Ruins” was the culmination of my “search.”

 

For me, that’s the essence of the novel, and the lapsometer is the physical bridge. Tom tells us, “My good luck came when I stumbled onto a way of measuring the length and breadth and motions of the very self. My little machine is the first caliper of the soul” (pp. 106-7).

 

I’d say its role in Tom’s life is to enable him to convince the world scientifically that the failure to reconcile material reality and the spiritual world is the root of humankind’s troubles. On the surface, that sounds like a plain old religious concept, but it ain’t that simple for Tom (the “Bad Catholic” and “fornicator”) as it was not for Binx, who declined to say he was on a search for God.

 

The device makes Tom’s situation better…unless it falls into the wrong hands later (spoiler alert!).

Diagnosis is somewhat subjective and not provable; objective proof requires the advent of treatment.

 

……Percy asked the same questions: “What was the protagonist’s problem?  Why was he alienated from the rest of society?  How did each novel work as a diagnostic and cognitive tool?”  Can these same questions, applied to the lapsometer within the novel, be asked of the novel itself?

 

I think Percy’s questions are central to the novel. Of course, answers are many. Tom’s worst “problem” started with Samantha’s illness and death. Also, he’s a sinner, but acknowledges it. He’s alienated from the rest of society partly because of his drinking and related behavior, but he’s a victim of existential despair that permeates the society he’s alienated from. Does he have a Christ complex? Some would claim so.

 

“Novel as a … tool” is something that always interested me about Percy. The act of writing, which includes focusing on material detail, and reading, which provides a triangulation (one of the doc’s favorite words) allowing us to participate in the experience, is an almost mystical treatment for alienation.

 

* At a memorial service for Walker Percy at St. Ignatius Loyola in Manhattan, Eudora Welty noted the similarity of the novelist’s responsibility and the physician’s: to listen to the human heart and say, “Thou ailest here, and here, and here.”  I mention this because we have in these chapters a section of the book rich in doctors: Tom himself, Dusty Rhoades, Max, Colley, archenemy Buddy Brown, the anonymous doctors in the mental hospital.  Since Percy indeed was a physician, this is not at all surprising.  Percy himself, in a review of the work of

…..Robert Coles, wrote, “He treads a narrow path between theorizing and novelizing….” …  Does our reliance on technology and science help or hurt our analysis of the human condition?

 

Well, since you bring up the late Robert Coles (who died June 4) in this connection, I’d like to mention that another scholar made an interesting connection to the medical world of “Arrowsmith” (“Love in the Ruins”: Sequel to “Arrowsmith,” by Lewis Lawson in his “Following Percy”). Lawson basically says the earlier novel (which also features a Max Gottlieb) satirizes physicians who become corrupted by middle-class materialistic values, and Percy satirizes Tom, as a physician who sees himself as a savior but denies the humanity of his subject matter.

 

Lawson is far more critical of Tom than I am.

In my view the other doctors in the novel are technicians who scientifically improve the physical health of patients without realizing the underlying source of their alienation.

 

* As a general reader, …Any other thematic thoughts I may have missed, or which were thematic, or important, to you?  Or just striking?

 

The “message” I drew from these early chapters is that the usual descriptions of the ills of humankind (left/right, black/white, Christian/Jewish) are less relevant to our divisions than deep-seated “forms of things unknown,” which Shakespeare said “the poet’s pen” gives “a local habitation and a name” (an allusion Tom makes describing his ”morning terror” on pages 109-10). That’s at the bottom of Tom’s cavalier attitude to societal divisions (conservatives and liberals alike have servants, only difference is where the servants are seated for the ride home, etc.). He laughs about the surface political and social features that divide us; he takes seriously the internal conditions that result in a failure to “diagnose the malaise.”

 

I have more, but there is surely a limit to your patience.  Fire away.  What did I miss?  Where did I go wrong?  Where did I blunder into something that made sense?  I look forward to a wide range of participants and participation.

 

Love your questions. One thing that hangs in my balance is how Tom’s smart-aleck comments (“The older Negroes are mostly trifling and no-account, while the young Negroes have turned mean as yard dogs.”) may have hurt Percy’s reputation.

 

Great stuff, Chuck,

Leonard

Slow Reader and Cat-Dipper

 

P.S.  Thank you, Doug, for acknowledging last week’s Vonnegut reference. I’ve tried to chase down Percy’s American and English influences for years, and was happy to find he appreciated Vonnegut. Meanwhile, great observation about Tom’s switching tenses (in your notes today)…interesting, effective narrative technique.

          And Karey, thank you. I originally thought about Lola in the aesthetic stage as a musician, but in thinking more about the pleasure feature of the stage, Moira seemed more “fun,” while Lola seemed more focused on requirements of her career, etc., and the discipline needed as a musician. Love to know more about Percy’s disagreement with the K-man, which you pointed out.

 

 

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