Walker Percy's Malicious Writing

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.

People are not usually "neutral" about Percy's writing. In regards to The Moviegoer, he stated, "They either like it and identify with it immediately, or they are repelled. As well as might be, since is the book is mainly an assault" (CWP 6). Percy means that they are attacking certain things that he sees is wrong. The Moviegoer and The Last Gentleman have a milder tone than his later novels. Percy often described how his writing is motivated out of disgust or animosity. He wrote to Shelby Foote, "Sometimes I think the creative urge comes from malice--a strong desire to attack one's enemies or at least those in the culture one considers to be wrong-headed and injurious--from one's own malice, envy, pride, and other capital sins" (Correspondence of Percy with Foote 128-129). This statement implies a critique of others and himself. In regards to his tone, he "laughs to Foote that Percy's wife Bunt agreed with a reviewer of Love in the Ruins that 'I am a smart ass!' (160)." Percy also remarks that Robert Cole's assessment of himself makes him look too good: "I feel a good deal more malevolent, oblique, phony, ironical, and, I hope, more entertaining" (CSFAP 251). 

Nisly thinks even if "Percy's fiction is often humorous, derisive, and hard to pin down, the reader must never lose sight of the larger affirmation that Percy is making" (161). Percy observed about his writing, "I'm always writing on the narrow edge between psychosis and neurosis and 'the norm.' My characters always have something apparently wrong with them and apparently they are living in a 'normal' world. The question is always that delicate balance: who is crazy and who is not? Who is right? The inkling is that the so-called neurotic or crazy person is on to something that 'normal' people are not" (MCWP 55). Nisly believes this focusing on his method "is one that resists simple univocal reading" (161; Walker Percy's Voices 20), because when he undermines a character he "may also be affirming some aspect that he or she represents." Because of Percy's levels of discourse it is often hard to pinpoint the exact meaning of the text. Percy's satire is ultimately life-affirming. His end is to build up after tearing down, especially, on better foundations. Percy's satire is "always launched in the mode of hope" (161).