From: "janetcantor37 AT yahoo.com" <janetcantor37 AT yahoo.com>
To: "Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion" <percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: Re: [percy-l] quote source
Date: Wed, 27 May 2015 03:12:01 +0000 (UTC)
Whatever I looked up, it only listed the quote as one of Percy's famous ones. It gave no source so I am assuming he said it in a speech at some point.
Janet Cantor
From: Skip Collins <skip.collins AT gmail.com>
Hello, I am new to the list, but have been reading Percy since college, around 1987.
Percy's 99th birthday this week prompted me to search for a quote I have seen attributed to him: "Fiction doesn’t tell us something we don’t know, it tells us something we know but don’t know that we know."
I have not been able to locate a source for the quote.
This paradoxical idea of "unknown knowns" fills a gap in the Rumsfeldian epistemology of "known knowns," "known unknowns," and "unknown unknowns."
Can anyone provide the source for the quote above? The closest I could find was from an interview he gave in the Paris Review in 1987, reprinted in More Conversations with Walker Percy: "The most commonplace example of the cognitive dimension in fiction is the reader’s recognition---sometimes the shock of recognition---the "verification" of a sector of reality that he had known but not known that he had known. I think of letters I get from readers, which may refer to a certain scene and say, in effect, yes! that’s the way it is!"