L. Lamar Nisly, "Percy's Edgy Satiric Fiction" in Wingless Chickens, Bayou Catholics, and Pilgrim Wayfarers: Constructions of Audience and Tone in O'Connor, Gautreaux, and Percy. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2011.
Walker Percy had four broad satiric targets in his writing: Southern Stoicism, scientism, excesses in society, and the Church. The previous post covered Southern Stoicism. This post will cover the other three.
Percy's second satiric target was scientism. This is a target in a majority of Percy's writing. It is a theme that occurs again and again. Percy was a supporter of science and the scientific method, but he was a critic of scientism. Scientism is when science refuses to acknowledge its limitations and argues it has a monopoly on all knowledge. Percy believed that "a kind of idolatry develops when people assume that science can answer the most foundational questions" (164). Percy, in his own life found that science was limited in fundamental questions, that it could cot provide ultimate meaning. Percy learned out the limits of science from his own journey. He became aware "that there was a huge gap in the scientific view of the world. This sector of the world about which science could not utter a single word was nothing less than this: what it is like to be an individual living in the United States in the twentieth century" (SSL 213). Science could only compare things with other things. It could not speak to the condition of the individual person.
A third area for Percy's attack was the "excesses" he saw in the "larger society." Percy spoke out often against abortion and euthanasia. He wrote an op-ed piece against abortion which the New York Times refused to publish. Percy was interested in other issues: war, capital punishment, poverty, racism. Percy stated that being pro-life was more than just being against abortion. He asserted, "you're prolife wherever life is threatened, not just in the case of abortion" (MCWP 121). Percy also satirized the sexual revolution in Lost in the Cosmos.
The last area of satirical attack was issues in the Church. Percy critiques the Church in the South:
The triumphant Christendom of the Sunbelt creates problems for the Southern novelist,
whether he is a believer or unbeliever. If he is an unbeliever, he may feel like attacking it,
but he really doesn't have the heart. It's like shooting fish in a barrel. Who needs another
Elmer Gantry?
If he is a believer, he is in a different kind of trouble. He finds himself in bed with the
wrong bedfellows. What makes it difficult for him is that they are proclaiming the same
good news he believes in, using the same noble biblical words, speaking of the same
treasure buried in the field, but somehow devaluing it. If these are the fellows who have
found the treasure buried in the field, then what manner of treasure is it? (SSL 180).
Percy thought that Christianity as practiced by modern Christians problematic because of the :failure of love" towards African-Americans and other minority groups. He also saw the Church as failing to be a light and a "voice of love and hope to an unbelieving world" (166).
Satirical attacks against four broad themes is prominent in the writings of Walker Percy: Southern Stoicism, scientism, the world and the Church. He sees these problems point to a deeper problem, a separation or absence of a relationship with God. Percy attacks these things to point people to a relationship with the transcendent (God).
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