Walker Percy: The Writer as Diagnostic Canary to Pilgrim Wayfarers

L. Lamar Nisley, "Walker Percy: The Writer as Diagnostic Canary to Pilgrim Wayfarers" 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.

In this chapter, Nisley situates Percy in his historical context: "Situating Walker Percy within a Catholic community and with relationship to Vatican II presents a variety of richly challenging complications, the most important of which is that Percy was a convert to Catholicism and adopted Covington, Louisiana as his hometown as an adult" (137). Covington is outside of New Orleans. It is interesting that Percy chose not to live in New Orleans. It reminds me of Binx in the moviegoer who chooses to live in Gentilly, instead of New Orleans. I lived 30 minutes from Covington during my college years. However, I was not aware of Percy until after his death. I first became interested in Percy when I heard on the radio about him. I soon after went to read all his works. That was over twenty years ago and I am still reading Percy.

Nisley thinks Percy's relationship with his audience is different that O'Connor's. She saw her audience as hostile, but Percy saw his audience "as more indifferent, or even confused" (135). Percy sees his readers as pilgrims and wayfarers like himself. Nisley thinks that Percy writings "grows from his Catholic placement" (136). Percy asserts, "there is hardly a moment in my writing when I am not aware of where, say, my main character--who is usually some kind of Catholic, bad, half-baked, lapsed, whatever--of where he or she stands vis-a-vis the Catholic faith" (SSL 368). For example, Dr. Tom Moore in Love in the Ruins describes himself as a bad Catholic. Why does Percy describe him in this way?

Percy believed that his Christian faith was a help, not a hindrance to his writing. It gave him the picture of the human condition: man as an alienated creature. This corresponded with the Fall of man. Percy also thought "the value placed on the individual and the sacramental quality of the ordinary serve[d] wonderful" (137-138). Percy writings emphasize both the individual and the sacramental aspect of life. Nisley thinks that the way Percy describes his characters tells how Percy looked at his audience: "You have a man in a predicament and on the move in a real world of real things, a world which is a sacrament and a mystery; a pilgrim whose life is a searching and a finding" (SSL 369). Maybe, the way Percy describes his writing indicate his view of his audience: "The novelist is less like a prophet than he is like a canary that coal miners used to take down into the shaft to test the air. When the canary gets unhappy, utters plaintive cries, and collapses, it may be time for the miners to surface and think things over" (MB 101). Percy compared his work to a canary on several occasions, so it was a consistent view of how he saw his writing. He wrote in Lost in the Cosmos that "the artist is both thin-skinned and prophetic and, like the canary lowered into the mine shaft to test the air, has caught a whiff of something lethal" (120). Percy saw himself as warning his audience of the dangers surrounding them that they are not aware.

Nisley thinks that Percy's decision to live in Covington, Louisiana tells us something else about Percy. His decision to live in Covington, "on the border between Catholic Southern Louisiana and the northern Bible belt section of Louisiana, also reflects Percy's own stance of maintaining enough distance from the Church as well as the broader culture to attack satirically the wrongs he saw in the Church and society" (138). I can see Percy as a psychoanalyst in this role. He keeps enough distance to evaluate the Church and society objectively. In the next post, we will look at Percy's biography.