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Subject: Walker Percy
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Re: [percy-l] The Last Gentleman reading group discussion ends Friday
- From: Doug Brown <wply1223 AT gmail.com>
- To: percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org
- Subject: Re: [percy-l] The Last Gentleman reading group discussion ends Friday
- Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2025 17:50:59 -0400
What a great Slow Read this summer. I appreciate all the insightful comments. I’ll just add three thoughts to finish out my own re-reading of the novel – some inconclusive ideas that I am still mulling over.
Alice and the Cat and Will and Sutter
In Alice in Wonderland, Alice has the following dialogue with the Cheshire Cat.
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where—” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“—so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”
I can’t help but feel like many of Will’s conversations with Sutter operate along this same line. Will is never sure where he’s trying to get to, so he doesn’t know what to ask. Sutter may or may not have any answers for Will, but he responds with a Cheshire Cat’s snidely unhelpful comments, a smirk (grin), and disappears.
Several folks in this Slow Read have wondered if Will would grow by the end of the novel and develop a stronger sense of agency. He doesn’t. No one believes his claims that he is going to marry Kitty and settle down as the personnel manager of a car dealership. At the very end, Will is still following Sutter around and asking weird questions. But I’m okay with that open-ended ending. I’ll explain that in a moment.
What?
The last half dozen pages of The Last Gentleman mostly consist of questions. Not just questions, but vaguely unanswered questions and lots of misunderstandings.
It starts with the priest asking Jamie repeatedly, “Do you understand me?” and Jamie fails to answer or only gives vague answers. Even as the priest asks the questions before baptism, we don’t really get any answers from Jamie even though the answers are fed to him.
Then the questions between Will and Sutter fill the remaining pages. Neither one really understands the other or offers clear thoughts. It’s all just questions. I just ran my finger down the final pages and counted 23 times that the word “What” is used in a question, often simply as that one word: “What?” – meaning, what did you say, what do you mean by that?
The word “why” shows up several times too.
Questions, questions, questions. So many questions, so many half asked questions, so many half answers.
Frankly, I found it to be a work of art! In my earlier readings of this novel, I’ve been frustrated by the trickle-off ending of the book. This time I was amazed by the boldness and artistry of it.
Wait!
I now see Will as a sort of Holy Fool in the vein of a Dostoyevsky novel. In the very end, Will is a savior. All this time, Will has thought that Sutter would save him by providing answers. But, instead, Will saves Sutter. As we’ve seen, Will is haunted by his father’s suicide. He sees suicide in Sutter’s future and cannot abide it.
Just like “what” and “why,” the word “wait” appears repeatedly in the final pages. A couple of times Will uses it to mean simply, “Don’t drive off yet. I want to ask you something.”
But then he uses it differently. Will realizes that Sutter’s “date” back at the ranch is not with the new young visitor to the ranch. His date is with his revolver.
Wait!
Will says the only thing anyone can ever say to someone who is on the verge of suicide. (I know that might seem like a strong claim for me to make, but I know a little something about the topic.) Wait! Pause. Do nothing. For just a little while, wait. Wait!
Then Will says that he needs Sutter more than Jamie or Val or any of the others do. Because this is Walker Percy, we are free to see the irony in that statement. We are able to see that in the end it’s not Will who needs Sutter, but Sutter who needs Will.
Will does finally have agency and purpose and focus. He will not allow another suicide.
Also, in line with Percy’s humor and irony, Sutter blurts out, “You kill me, Barrett.” Well, no, he’s saving you, Sutter.
As others here have mentioned, the Edsel is a metaphor for Sutter. All the more reason to love the final line of the novel: The Edsel waited for him.
Doug Brown
Asheville, NC
Alice and the Cat and Will and Sutter
In Alice in Wonderland, Alice has the following dialogue with the Cheshire Cat.
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where—” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“—so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”
I can’t help but feel like many of Will’s conversations with Sutter operate along this same line. Will is never sure where he’s trying to get to, so he doesn’t know what to ask. Sutter may or may not have any answers for Will, but he responds with a Cheshire Cat’s snidely unhelpful comments, a smirk (grin), and disappears.
Several folks in this Slow Read have wondered if Will would grow by the end of the novel and develop a stronger sense of agency. He doesn’t. No one believes his claims that he is going to marry Kitty and settle down as the personnel manager of a car dealership. At the very end, Will is still following Sutter around and asking weird questions. But I’m okay with that open-ended ending. I’ll explain that in a moment.
What?
The last half dozen pages of The Last Gentleman mostly consist of questions. Not just questions, but vaguely unanswered questions and lots of misunderstandings.
It starts with the priest asking Jamie repeatedly, “Do you understand me?” and Jamie fails to answer or only gives vague answers. Even as the priest asks the questions before baptism, we don’t really get any answers from Jamie even though the answers are fed to him.
Then the questions between Will and Sutter fill the remaining pages. Neither one really understands the other or offers clear thoughts. It’s all just questions. I just ran my finger down the final pages and counted 23 times that the word “What” is used in a question, often simply as that one word: “What?” – meaning, what did you say, what do you mean by that?
The word “why” shows up several times too.
Questions, questions, questions. So many questions, so many half asked questions, so many half answers.
Frankly, I found it to be a work of art! In my earlier readings of this novel, I’ve been frustrated by the trickle-off ending of the book. This time I was amazed by the boldness and artistry of it.
Wait!
I now see Will as a sort of Holy Fool in the vein of a Dostoyevsky novel. In the very end, Will is a savior. All this time, Will has thought that Sutter would save him by providing answers. But, instead, Will saves Sutter. As we’ve seen, Will is haunted by his father’s suicide. He sees suicide in Sutter’s future and cannot abide it.
Just like “what” and “why,” the word “wait” appears repeatedly in the final pages. A couple of times Will uses it to mean simply, “Don’t drive off yet. I want to ask you something.”
But then he uses it differently. Will realizes that Sutter’s “date” back at the ranch is not with the new young visitor to the ranch. His date is with his revolver.
Wait!
Will says the only thing anyone can ever say to someone who is on the verge of suicide. (I know that might seem like a strong claim for me to make, but I know a little something about the topic.) Wait! Pause. Do nothing. For just a little while, wait. Wait!
Then Will says that he needs Sutter more than Jamie or Val or any of the others do. Because this is Walker Percy, we are free to see the irony in that statement. We are able to see that in the end it’s not Will who needs Sutter, but Sutter who needs Will.
Will does finally have agency and purpose and focus. He will not allow another suicide.
Also, in line with Percy’s humor and irony, Sutter blurts out, “You kill me, Barrett.” Well, no, he’s saving you, Sutter.
As others here have mentioned, the Edsel is a metaphor for Sutter. All the more reason to love the final line of the novel: The Edsel waited for him.
Doug Brown
Asheville, NC
On Mon, Jul 28, 2025 at 3:57 PM Wade Riddick <wriddick AT usa.net> wrote:
"Spuriously elegant and unsound." Doesn't that describe much of the
supposedly frivolous serendipity about beauty, the fact that these moments
can't last? (Because, if they did, would they be beautiful?)
The issue of cults has preoccupied me greatly of late. Antisocial digital
media doesn't seem to me much different than the curated analog variety of the
three networks in Percy's era, promoting different forms of material salvation
while we amuse ourselves to death (Neil Postman). (Percy's dismissive
personal comments about a TV Faulkner movie with Don Johnson stand out in my
memory from the time I interviewed him in high school at the LSU Union.)
Our digital "influencer" culture isn't much different than what Bernays kicked
off by twisting Freud's insights into commercial propaganda. It seems to me
that Freud's mass psychology gave birth to three movements. Of the Nazi's -
who preoccupied Percy's writing - the Communists (never much of a threat in
America) and America's commercial propaganda, it seems only the later really
survived and is still in the business of strangling society. ("There is no
such thing as society," neoliberal Margaret Thatcher said.)
The force of market demand makes sure you can only hear what you want to - not
necessarily what you need to (and who determines how you get those
"preferences?" They don't simply spring whole from the mind of Zeus). The
current proliferation of peculiar delusions reminds me of the late stages of
the Roman Empire as plague, deflation, invasions, corruption, debt and lead
poisoning took their toll. People sought solace in all manner of cults
promising "truth" and "salvation" to the select. In reality, this tribalism
is pulling at the common faith required to be a culture - resulting in that
"virtue signaling," which amounts to little more than tribal totemism. (I
think in _Lost in the Cosmos_, Percy pokes fun at this with the example, "An
LSU fan might call himself a tiger.")
I've never seen this as anything more than cheerleaders on the sidelines
baiting the other team with insults. Unlike the sectional crisis in 1861,
though, this is not a tribal conflict with neat, bright geographic divisions.
When you privatize fire-fighting, the result is arson for profit. You're
taking an expert in how fires get started and telling him the richest he'll
ever be is when the world burns, because he's making a profit off every fire -
and that's maximum profit. That's what happens when everything in a
society/culture becomes "for-profit."
Slapping an ad between every digital friendship, romance, social interaction
creates the same perverse antisocial incentives. Privatizing truth gives you
disinformation-for-profit. Save costs by driving down the quality of the
information (your supply). Soon journalism is dead, truth is passé, and you
just want something for "engagement" - and any conspiracy theory will do. At
the demand end, you rob your consumers of their privacy to monetize that. So
the middleman network monopoly is chiseling off the other end of the
supply/demand exchange for "information." The result is perpetually angry,
callous, used - and irony-free - people fed on the informational equivalent of
an addictive junk food diet giving them mental obesity (or leaky fat brain as
scammer con man RFK, Jr. would call it).
This fiction most certainly does not provide the alienation reversal of a good
yarn. This is fiction, all right, but the fiction of a con game, genuinely
trying to earn your confidence only to betray it at your expense - whereas the
author lets you in on the "con" from the start to make you laugh when you
realize your expectations have been betrayed. So note the lack of irony in
these folks, which was always a very important mirror for Percy. Anything
remotely humorous expels one from your cult. (I don't really see Left and
Right in this country anymore.)
This is not just symbols without reality. It's symbols without society - a
heterogeneous place where we belong, that loves us. We live in a society that
loves sex and hates love because intimacy and privacy are required for love
and that can't be tolerated by Big Brother Profit out to monetize everything.
(If somebody actually falls in love on Tinder, that's bad; they won't be
coming back for more "matches" where you can monetize them with another ad.
Stealing their personal data lets you more optimally "target" them, distilling
them demographically and refining and concentrating them like ore into this
interest group or that, as if our lives were mountaintops to be blown apart
for the coal inside, the pollution trickling down below be damned.)
In this sense, the _Dobbs_ (2022) decision from the Supreme Court is the
ultimate _expression_ of the Big Data ideology of our day, since the court
majority purports to read the Fourth Amendment and conclude there's no "right
to privacy" there.
These digital media lies are not the lies that tell the truth in normal
fiction. It is mythologizing - allegory creation - without the actual
salvation of the individual involved, unlike a novelist or a prophet. David
Foster Wallace (_Infinite Jest_) talked about these perverse corporate
incentives in an interview shortly before his suicide, how they would betray
us. (I discussed them in my work on digital communications and economic
cartels back in the 1990s. And Ted Nelson remarked in the hypertext
attribution issues back in his PhD work in the '70s. Without accountability
in speech, you get mob rule - mob, as in mafia. Now there's a cult of
will-to-power for you, and the real basis for fascism.)
And much of this social media content is not promoted any longer by actual
people engaging with it, but with A.I. and bot farms posting the "likes" -
essentially giving away the game: actual people are dispensable in antisocial
media for determining "popularity." (Now there's irony for you.)
It seems to me when Christianity hit the little screen and got those 99 takes
to get it right, the aim became fundraising. Hate and fear sold donations
better than love or hope. Jimmy Swaggert's recent death brings this to mind.
He used to live literally four doors down from me where I'm typing now in
Baton Rouge. He got his start "preaching" in front of dime stores to create a
diversion while his cousins robbed the back. Percy was always concerned how
to get the Catholic Church on TV without falling into the same pit of
"wowsing," as the Aussies would call it. (Swaggert was famous for driving
prostitutes out of Baton Rouge - one at a time, in his own car. Judging from
what I saw of the scandal from working with Art Harris and John Camp at CNN,
the ride definitely was not "spuriously elegant"; just plain unsound.)
I think the Left and Right got torn apart by the Me Generation heresies that
bloomed in the '70s, killing off universal truth. Derrida and deconstruction
were twisted into saying that every story is radically impenetrable and
therefore it's all about personal truth (begging the question if language
can't convey universal experience, why are we all talking?) On the "right,"
charismatics substituted "personal testimony" for Gospel truth - which is why
you have "Christian nationalists" (ain't no such a thing, Maggie) claiming
that feeding starving children through a Catholic charity with USAID funds is
some CIA plot.
But I don't digress.
------ Original Message ------
Received: Wed, 23 Jul 2025 03:07:50 PM EDT
From: "jp AT jlarsp.com" <jp AT jlarsp.com>
To: percy list <percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: Re: [percy-l] The Last Gentleman reading group discussion ends
Friday
That seems to be the crux of the matter. How do we become the genuine article?
How do we tell? Or is it all a con? The search always continues for the
genuine article. Of course the Martin routine can be seen with another twist,
I think. In it, is the genuine article just the “true believer” who will
fall into a cult? Is that better or worse than a con? And I’m losing my
point here, so onward I go.
Thank you, Doug, for your great comments! You covered a lot of the ground I
was thinking and musing about. And thanks to all for their great insights. It
makes the novel so much richer to see how it has reached people in different
ways. I could say a lot more here, and don’t want to rehash too many things
already discussed. I was sorry I couldn’t participate in real time.
Hopefully next summer if we do another slow read.
A final thought that I don’t think was discussed, is what happened, what is
the meaning of the final scene. Will is talking to Sutter, and Sutter asks—
“Anything else?”
“No sir.”
But as the Edsel took off, spavined and sprung, sunk at one corner and
flatulent in its muffler, spuriously elegant and unsound, like a Negro’s
car, a fake Ford, a final question did occur to him and he took off after it.
“Wait,” he shouted in a dead run.
The Edsel paused, sighed, and stopped.
Strength flowed like oil into his muscles and he ran with great
joyous ten-foot antelope bounds.
The Edsel waited for him.
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-
[percy-l] The Last Gentleman reading group discussion ends Friday,
Henry P. Mills III, 07/21/2025
- Re: [percy-l] The Last Gentleman reading group discussion ends Friday, jp AT jlarsp.com, 07/23/2025
-
Re: [percy-l] The Last Gentleman reading group discussion ends Friday,
Leonard, 07/25/2025
- Re: [percy-l] The Last Gentleman reading group discussion ends Friday, honeyjbc1, 07/25/2025
- <Possible follow-up(s)>
-
Re: [percy-l] The Last Gentleman reading group discussion ends Friday,
Wade Riddick, 07/28/2025
- Re: [percy-l] The Last Gentleman reading group discussion ends Friday, Doug Brown, 07/28/2025
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