Signposts in a Strange Land

by Walker Percy

  It would be interesting, by the way, to compare the Southern and Jewish experience in the terms of the encounter of a strongly knit, beleaguered tradition emerging into the heady air of the American consensus, where, for a few years at least, it flares like a match struck in pure oxygen, before it flames out—that is, blends with the general cultural chemistry around it. The best of literary times for the South, strangely enough, were not the antebellum years of a leisure society which might have produced a Jane Austen or a Samuel Johnson and did not, did not even come close, but rather a time after years of defeat and humiliation when a few young Southerners entered the mainstream of American culture in a full consciousness of their own roots.

  But if there are literary assets in the Christian view of man, there are also serious impediments in the current historical manifestation of Christendom. It has to do with the devaluation of the Christian vocabulary and the media inflation of its contents. The old words, God, grace, sin, redemption, which used to signify within a viable semiotic system, now tend to be either exhausted, worn slick as poker chips and signifying as little, or else are heard as the almost random noise of radio and TV preachers. The very word “Christian” is not good news to most readers.

  Theoretically, one should prefer the good news of the Sunday-morning media sermons to the sex and violence of weekday TV. But after listening to what is called the Christian network for a couple of hours, it is a relief to get back to J.R. and Dallas.

  The Christendom of the Old South with its grim roadside signs—PREPARE TO MEET ETERNITY—served the novelist’s purposes better than Oral Roberts’s cheerful announcement that Something Good Is Going to Happen to You. The Southern inkling was rather that something bad is going to happen to you, if it hasn’t happened already.

  The triumphant Christendom of the Sunbelt creates problems for the Southern novelist, whether he is believer or unbeliever. If he is an unbeliever, he may feel like attacking it, but really he hasn’t 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 a field, but somehow devaluing it. If these are the fellows who have found the treasure buried in a field, then what manner of treasure is it?

  I hasten to say that his, the writer’s, discomfort has nothing to do with the ancient Catholic-Protestant quarrel. Catholic or Protestant, he is equally unhappy.

  He feels like Lancelot in search of the Holy Grail who finds himself at the end of his quest at a Tupperware party.

  Is he being elitist? Perhaps. Does he dislike Jerry Falwell too easily and for the wrong reasons? Does he have the same ironic contempt that the cultivated Greek intellectuals had for St. Paul? Well, I don’t really think so. But before he writes off the Moral Majority, he had better consider the alternative, or one alternative. I once saw a debate between Jerry Falwell and Bob Guccione, editor of Penthouse, and had no trouble at all choosing between the Gospel According to Falwell and the Gospel According to Guccione.

  At any rate, finding himself in the thriving Sunbelt informed as it is by a species of triumphant Christendom, with the highest percentage of churchgoers anywhere in the world except South Africa, the writer tends to fall silent. His natural inclination, Christian or not, is, like Søren Kierkegaard’s, to attack Christendom. If he is a Christian, he must be at last as cunning and devious as Joyce advised—more cunning even than Joyce, for he is working with a prostituted vocabulary which must be either discarded or somehow miraculously rejuvenated. The stance which comes most naturally to him is not that of edification but rather that of challenge, offense, shock, attack, subversion. With the best of intentions, he subverts both the Christendom and the paganism of his culture and he does so cheerfully and in good heart, because as a creature of the culture he is subverting himself, first, last, and always.

  So there, as I see it, is the present plight of the Southern novelist: both beneficiary and victim of the label “Southern” and, whether he likes it or not, the denizen of a clamorous Christian culture which he is in a sense stuck with, whether he is Christian, Jew or humanist.

  So what is he to do? Let me make an assumption before I make a suggestion. The assumption is that he is still heir to a unique literary legacy, the same tradition which informed the Nashville poets and critics and the Deep South novelists of the 1920s and 1930s. His great advantage is that he can see the American scene from both the inside and the outside—inside because, living as he does in the resurgent Sunbelt, he is more American than ever; from the outside because he’s still Southern whether he likes it or not, which is to say he can still see the American proposition from a tragic historical perspective. He knows in his bones that things can come to grief and probably will. And whether he is a believer or not, he is also more likely to know that man is tragically flawed and is born to trouble as the sparks fly up. He is subject to his own version of Murphy’s Law—not that if something can go wrong, it will—but rather that something has already gone wrong and is going to get worse without the supervention of a mystery beyond the scope of a sociological or a psychological novel.

  So what should he do? His natural mission in this place and these times is, if not search and destroy, then probe and challenge. His greatest service is to attack, that is to say, satirize. Don’t forget that satire is not primarily destructive. It attacks one thing in order to affirm another. It assaults the fake and the phony in the name of the truth. It ridicules the inhuman in order to affirm the human. Satire is always launched in the mode of hope.

  What else to do in a Sunbelt South increasingly informed by a flatulent Christendom and Yankee money-grubbing? For the danger is that we are going to end up with the worst of both worlds, the worst of Southern Christendom—that is, an inflated media Christendom without the old Southern pieties—and the worst of Northern materialism—a kind of mindless money-sports-Vegas culture without stern secular saints like Thoreau, Emerson, Melville, Hawthorne.

  James McBride Dabbs, a wise man, once wrote that a great culture is recognizable through its artists and its saints and not by its GNP. And the South, he said, with all its promise, paradoxically did not have time to develop a full-fledged culture. And why not? Because, through bad luck, historical accident, and human weakness, it got diverted through most of its history by a single-minded preoccupation, its great obsession with slavery and race—from which it is only just now emerging. So it is no accident that in the last century its heroes were military and political, its patron saint a general, Robert E. Lee.

  Although we in the South like to make much of the high culture of antebellum plantation life, of our close ties to Europe, the Grand Tour, college years abroad, of grand pianos imported from France, of bookshelves full of sets of English novelists, especially Walter Scott—and, later on, of an embattled period following the Defeat—let’s face it: it is difficult to name a single world-class writer in the South until the 1920s, if we except the early political writings of the Virginians and such marginal types as Poe and Mark Twain. But little or nothing of literary value came from the mainstream of the culture itself. Why? Because of the Great Obsession. It is difficult for a man to write a great novel in a state of paranoia, or a great poem when most of his energies go to trying to convince himself and the world that black is white—or rather that black is black, that black is not beautiful but black is happy anyhow.

  Only in the past generation has it become possible for Southern writers, white and black, to get out from under the terrible burden of race, either the defense of it or the condemnation of it.

  Who are the culture heroes of the South now? Bear Bryant, Burt Reynolds, Kenny Rogers, and Hershel Walker. Now, no one would deny that these are admirable fellows. Recently, on the occasion of Bear Bryant’s 315th football victory, Southern
senators sponsored a vote of acclamation. It’s fine for Bear Bryant so to be acclaimed. But I don’t recall a similar vote when Faulkner won the Nobel Prize or Eudora Welty won the Gold Medal for American Literature.

  This is probably as it should be. A writer worth his salt is probably better off in an adversarial relation with the U.S. Senate. I, for one, would get very nervous if my writings were acclaimed by the Louisiana legislature. Beware of the novelist who is on intimate terms with Presidents, bishops or Billy Graham, Dr. Spock or Madalyn Murray O’Hair.

  What I am saying is that the artist, poet, or novelist is not necessarily at home in the South or the United States now—if he ever was—and that is as it should be. If in the best of times it is the artist’s vocation to celebrate his culture—like Dante or Shakespeare or Tolstoy—in other times it may be his vocation to nag, to challenge, to be a thorn in the side, even a pain in the neck. But in so doing, and this is the point, he is not subverting, he is not the enemy of the people. He, she, if he is any good, is always speaking from his truest self to the reader and affirming himself in a way which the reader cannot fail to recognize. Even at his most satirical, he is not destructive, for the entire literary enterprise is mounted in hope—otherwise, he would not take the trouble to set pen to paper, for serious writing is no end of trouble and misery.

  Above all, he is open to the mystery of his art. By this openness and this mystery, I am speaking of a necessary sensitivity to the hidden dimensions and energies of his characters and of the presence of the mystery which may always erupt in their lives and which, for want of a better word, we may call grace. Neither he nor his characters may know why certain things happen as they do. But unless such things do happen and unless he, the novelist, is open to them, he is forever doomed to a literary sociology and psychology, or to being politicized, and whether it is liberal or conservative politics, it doesn’t matter: the writing is going to be bad. When I speak of “serious” writers, I am also speaking of comic writers. They are not mutually exclusive categories. What I am not talking about, will not even take the trouble to deal with, are the clones and prostitutes and pimps of current commercial writing. In the South, such writing often takes the form of Southern belles and good ol’ boys who think they have to write like whores talk. Fanny Hill had certain skills, but writing was not one of them. And Southern good ol’ boy poets and novelists who think that if you drink enough and chase enough students, somehow the great god Dionysus is going to inspire you. Unfortunately, Dionysus was not obliged to sit down at a typewriter, and it would have been just as well if some of these fellows hadn’t either.

  What is at issue is a very great opportunity. The American novel is, with a couple of honorable exceptions, demoralized. The young Southern artist, fiction writer, and poet are presently hanging fire. He doesn’t know which way to jump. He knows he comes from a great tradition, but God help him if he tries to go back, back to Faulkner’s Mississippi or O’Connor’s Georgia. We’ve been there. God help him, too, if he tries to do a Cheever or an Updike number on a town like Lafayette.

  I’m afraid he’s on his own. His freedom and opportunities are so great that it scares him. He can’t go back to sharecroppers’ cabins and crumbling mansions haunted by Confederate ghosts. Yet he probably lives in a teeming Sunbelt community, with an ethnic mix, an amalgam of economic prosperity and spiritual dislocation which is the very stuff of fiction. Take this fellow, this Midwesterner transplanted to Louisiana who has made two billion dollars from oil leases and has never read a novel, who lives in an antebellum mansion in New Orleans and who is so absorbed in deal-making that he is a stranger to his friends and family. Maybe he can’t use me, but I can sure use him.

  Maybe it’s hopeless. Maybe the artistic future of the victorious Sunbelt is less Nashville poetry and more Nashville sound, more Smokey and the Bandit in film, more Texas soap opera, and in literature, the latter-day adventures of would-be Scarlett O’Haras, or the Confessions of a Georgia Co-ed.

  But I don’t think it’s hopeless. Writers turn up in the unlikeliest places—people who just decide to go their own way, tear up the book, make their own music. Two such names come immediately to mind: Beth Henley in Mississippi and John Kennedy Toole in Louisiana, whose writings are outrageous, funny, yet eminently serious.

  The possibilities of the “Southern novel” are unlimited, unlimited in its ability both to re-create the South and to shape American literature, which God knows could use it.

  The possibilities of failure and default are also unlimited.

  Being no prophet, I decline to speculate, though, like a prophet, I tend to be pessimistic.

  But we’ll see.

  1984

  From Facts to Fiction

  THERE FOLLOWS THE STORY, for whom it may interest, of how it came to pass that a physician turned writer and became a novelist. It is hardly a momentous or a typical story. But perhaps it is the nature of the beast that no writer finds his vocation typically. Nor can I imagine this account to be of any use to either would-be physicians or would-be writers. I would not recommend to young writers that they serve an apprenticeship in medicine or to physicians that they take up novel-writing.

  But perhaps what value there is in my experience is to be found in the oddness of it, specifically in the circumstance that it is possible for a man to set out seriously with a scientific vocation, change in midstream to an artistic vocation, practice it quite as seriously, offer his wares in an open market, and, in a moderate degree, succeed. Perhaps the only moral to the story is that a serious writer, or any other artist for that matter, is a peculiar bird who has to find his own way in his own time and who had better be left alone to do so.

  At any rate, it came to pass in my own life that I found myself left very much to my own devices, although it was not the sort of aloneness I had bargained for. What happened was that while I was working as a pathologist at Bellevue Hospital in New York, where my duties included the examination of the tissues of tuberculous patients, I contracted pulmonary tuberculosis and found myself flat on my back in a sanatorium in the Adirondack Mountains, faced with the prospect of a year or more of enforced inactivity.

  The chronicle of such a misfortune—for misfortune it certainly seemed at the time—is perhaps best related in terms of its consequences for one’s inner life, the area of the deepest convictions and the unspoken assumptions by which every man lives his life (and if a man thinks he has no such assumptions, they are all the stronger for not being recognized).

  Though I am descended from a long line of lawyers, my own bent from the beginning had been toward science—and still is. It was the elegance and order and, yes, beauty of science which attracted me. It is not merely the truth of science that makes it beautiful, but its simplicity. That is to say, its constant movement is in the direction of ordering the endless variety and the seeming haphazardness of ordinary life by discovering underlying principles which as science progresses become ever fewer and more rigorously and exactly formulated—at least in the physical sciences.

  At Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, I was particularly attracted by a pervasive attitude among some of my teachers. It can best be expressed by a phrase we students heard again and again: “the mechanism of disease.” It struck me then, as now, as an idea of the most revolutionary simplicity and beauty; namely, that even the dis-order of dis-ease, which one generally takes to be the very disruption of order, could be approached and understood and treated according to scientific principles governing the response of the patient to the causative agents of disease. This response was the disease as the physician sees it! Of course, it was hardly a new idea, but, new or old, it was an exciting discovery for a young man who had always thought of disease as disorder to be set right somehow by the “art” of medicine.

  Such, at any rate, was one reason I found myself in the pathology laboratory at Bellevue, where it seemed medicine came closest to being the science it should be and furthest from the a
rts and crafts of the bedside manner. Under the microscope, in the test tube, in the colorimeter, one could actually see the beautiful theater of disease and even measure the effect of treatment on the disease process. Then came the cataclysm, brought to pass appropriately enough by one of these elegant agents of disease, the same scarlet tubercle bacillus I used to see lying crisscrossed like Chinese characters in the sputum and lymphoid tissue of the patients at Bellevue. Now I was one of them.

  What was the effect of cataclysm, the interruption of my chosen career, and the two years of physical inactivity which followed? An effect there was, it could hardly have been otherwise, but it was not, I hasten to say, any slackening of my allegiance to the rigor and discipline of the scientific method. The effect was rather a shift of ground, a broadening of perspective, a change of focus. What began to interest me was not so much a different question as a larger question, not the physiological and pathological processes within man’s body but the problem of man himself, the nature and destiny of man; specifically and more immediately, the predicament of man in a modern technological society. I began to read, no longer Macleod’s Physiology or Gay’s Bacteriology, but the great Russian novelists, especially Dostoevsky; the modern French novelists, especially Camus; the existentialist philosophers, Jaspers (also a physician), Marcel, and Heidegger.