Walker Percy's use of Satire

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.

Nisly asserts, "Percy's novels are, at times, wacky and over-the-top and potentially offensive--engaging in a kind of broad satiric comedy. At the same time, the stance from which Percy is writing is also from the edge, since his plaintive--and sometimes frantic--canary cries point out all areas in need of correction that he observes from his stance on the margins" (159). I have noticed or observed Percy to be a person on the margins of different communities: Church, Covington, the South, American culture, the Academy. Percy, even after conversion continued living as a wayfarer. This is why many readers feel drawn to his work. In addition, he is a satirical writer. He pokes fun at many modern theories in his writings, scientism, materialism, secularism.

Percy's purpose for his satirical writing is to produce change in his reader. Some reviewers have criticized Percy for being to harsh in his criticism, but it is important to keep in mind his purpose for his satirical wring. Percy sees himself as "life-affirming," but "before life can be affirmed for the novelist or his readers, death-in-life must be named." Pointing out this death-in-life is, Percy asserts, "a thousand times more life-affirming than all the life-affirming self-help books about me being okay and you being okay and everybody being okay, but more likely in deep trouble" (SSL 164). Percy points out the troubles in the world to wake up his reader from the the "malaise" and "everydayness" and to begin a search for real life.

Percy thinks religious language is worn out, so he can not speak directly about the Christian faith that "motivates his writing" (159). Nisly compares O'Connor's approach with Percy's: "In contrast to O'Connor, who often directly attacked unbelief in her fiction..., Percy's satiric approach, I believe, is his effort to engage indirectly his reader's spiritual malaise" (159-160). Percy's malaise is like Kierkegaard's despair without knowing one is in despair. One is dead, but does not know it. Percy is "distressed about the disbelief he sees around him, but he generally invokes this spiritual concern more obliquely through his dire criticisms of societal wrongs"(160). He see these wrongs as symptoms of larger problems. He thinks they point to spiritual issues. Nisly thinks that there are four basic targets for his satire in his novels: "his critique of southern Stoicism, his repudiation of Scientism, his condemnation of societal ills, and his criticism of the Church's failings" (160). These themes do appear in the early novels, but they are more prominent in his later novels, beginning with Love in the Ruins. It does not seem to be prominent in his Second Coming. Nisly asserts that "Percy also targets those characters who seem to represent his own positions, satirizing the moralists themselves" (160).