Signposts in a Strange Land

by Walker Percy

  Such a view of man as wayfarer is, I submit, nothing else than a recipe for the best novel-writing from Dante to Dostoevsky. Even an excellent atheist novelist like Sartre borrows from this traditional anthropology for the upside-down pilgrimage of his characters into absurdity.

  It is no accident, I think, that the great religions of the East, especially Hinduism and Buddhism, with their devaluation of the individual and of reality itself, are not notable for the novels of their devotees.

  Only recently, in so-called post-modern fiction, has the novelist abandoned this anthropology in favor of absorption with self or with the text, not the meaning, of words. The results are predictable.

  Show me a young California novelist raised in Taoism who spends his life meditating on the Way and I’ll show you a bad novelist.

  Show me a lapsed Catholic who writes a good novel about being a young Communist at Columbia and I’ll show you a novelist who owes more to Sister Gertrude at Sacred Heart in Brooklyn, who slapped him clean out of his seat for disrespect to the Eucharist, than he owes to all of Marxist dialectic.

  In the end, ten boring Hail Marys are worth more to the novelist than ten hours of Joseph Campbell on TV.

  I have not mentioned the exceedingly important use of comedy in fiction—a different matter altogether—but there’s not space here.

  Anyhow, the notion of saying one’s beads while watching Joseph Campbell is funny enough as it is.

  1989

  Epilogue

  An Interview and a Self-interview

  An Interview with Zoltán Abádi-Nagy

  HOW DID YOU SPEND your seventieth birthday?

  An ordinary day. I went with my wife and some friends to a neighborhood restaurant in New Orleans. I think I had crawfish. What distinguishes Louisianians is that they suck the heads.

  You and your wife recently celebrated your fortieth anniversary. Is it easy, do you imagine, to be married to a writer?

  Mine has been a happy marriage—thanks mainly to my wife. Who would want to live with a novelist? A man underfoot in the house all day? A man, moreover, subject to solitary funks and strange elations. If I were a woman, I’d prefer a traveling salesman. There is no secret, or rather the secrets are buried in platitudes. That is to say, it has something to do with love, commitment, and family. As to the institution, it is something like Churchill’s description of democracy: vicissitudinous yes, but look at the alternatives.

  What are the decisive moments, turning points that you regard as the milestones of those seven decades?

  What comes to mind is something like this: (1) losing both parents in my early teens and being adopted by my Uncle Will, a poet, and being exposed to the full force of a remarkable literary imagination; (2) contracting a nonfatal case of tuberculosis while serving as an intern in Bellevue Hospital in New York, an event which did not so much change my life as give me leave to change it; (3) getting married; (4) becoming a Catholic.

  If you had the chance, would you decide to be reborn or to flee back into William Blake’s “the vales of Har”?

  No vales of Har, thank you. No rebirth either, but I wouldn’t mind a visit in the year 2050—a short visit, not more than half an hour—say, to a park bench at the southeast corner of Central Park in New York, with a portable radio. Just to have a look around, just to see whether we made it, and if so, in what style. One could tell in half an hour. By “we” of course, I do not mean just Americans, but the species. Homo sapiens sapiens.

  Once you said that if you were starting over, you might like to make films. Would there be other decisions that would be different?

  I might study linguistics—not in the current academic meanings of the word, but with a fresh eye, like Newton watching the falling apple: How come? What’s going on here?

  Apropos of your fascination with film, most of it finds its way into your novels on the thematic level, especially in The Moviegoer and Lancelot. Does it happen that film or television influences you in less noticeable ways as well, such as cinematic structuring of material and so on?

  I can only answer in the most general way: that what television and movies give the writer is a new community and a new set of referents. Since nearly everyone watches television a certain number of hours a day (whether they admit it or not), certain turns of plot are ready-made for satirical use; namely, the Western shootout, one man calling another out, a mythical dance of honor. In my last novel I described one character as looking something like Blake Carrington. Now, you may not know who Blake Carrington is—though sooner or later most Hungarians will. A hundred million Americans do know. [He is John Forsythe’s character in the television series Dynasty.]

  Could you tell me how you feel about your inspiring beliefs, how faithful you have remained to them?

  If you mean, am I still a Catholic, the answer is yes. The main difference after thirty-five years is that my belief is less self-conscious, less ideological, less polemical. My ideal is Thomas More, an English Catholic—a peculiar breed nowadays—who wore his faith with grace, merriment, and a certain wryness. Incidentally, I reincarnated him again in my new novel and I’m sorry to say he has fallen upon hard times; he is a far cry from the saint, drinks too much, and watches reruns of M*A*S*H on TV.

  As for philosophy and religion, do you still regard yourself as a philosophical Catholic existentialist?

  Philosophical? Existentialist? Religion? Pretty heavy. These are perfectly good words—except perhaps “existentialist”—but over the years they have acquired barnacle-like connotative excrescences. Uttering them induces a certain dreariness and heaviness in the neck muscles. As for “existentialist,” I’m not sure it presently has a sufficiently clear referent to be of use. Even “existentialists” forswear the term. It fell into disuse some years ago when certain novelists began saying things like: I beat up my wife in an existential moment—meaning a sudden, irrational impulse.

  Is it possible to define your Catholic existentialism in a few sentences?

  I suppose I would prefer to describe it as a certain view of man, an anthropology, if you like; of man as wayfarer, in a rather conscious contrast to prevailing views of man as organism, as encultured creature, as consumer, Marxist, as subject to such-and-such a scientific or psychological understanding—all of which he is, but not entirely. It is the “not entirely” I’m interested in—like the man Kierkegaard described who read Hegel, understood himself and the universe perfectly by noon, but then had the problem of living out the rest of the day. It, my “anthropology,” has been expressed better in an earlier, more traditional language—e.g., scriptural: man born to trouble as the sparks fly up; Gabriel Marcel’s Homo viator.

  You converted to Catholicism in the 1940s. What was the motive behind that decision?

  There are several ways to answer the question. One is theological. The technical theological term is grace, the gratuitous unmerited gift from God. Another answer is less theological: What else is there? Did you expect me to become a Methodist? a Buddhist? a Marxist? a comfortable avuncular humanist like Walter Cronkite? an exhibitionist like Allen Ginsberg? A proper literary-philosophical-existentialist answer is that the occasion was the reading of Kierkegaard’s extraordinary essay: “On the Difference between a Genius and an Apostle.” Like the readings that mean most to you, what it did was to confirm something I suspected but that it took Søren Kierkegaard to put into words: that what the greatest geniuses in science, literature, art, philosophy utter are sentences which convey truths sub specie aeternitatis; that is to say, sentences which can be confirmed by appropriate methods and by anyone, anywhere, any time. But only the apostle can utter sentences which can be accepted on the authority of the apostle; that is, his credentials, sobriety, trustworthiness as a news bearer. These sentences convey not knowledge sub specie aeternitatis but news.

  I noticed that you rarely refer to other converted novelists like Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh when discussing your ideas. Or if you do, it is rarely, if ever, in this con
text.

  Maybe it’s because novelists don’t talk much about each other. Maybe this is because novelists secrete a certain BO which only other novelists detect, like certain buzzards who emit a repellent pheromone detectable only by other buzzards, which is to say that only a novelist can know how neurotic, devious, underhanded a novelist can be. Actually, I have the greatest admiration for both writers, not necessarily for their religion, but for their consummate craft.

  Can we discuss the “Los Angelized” and re-Christianized New South? Is there anything new in the way the South is developing in the 1980s or in the way you read the South or your own relation to it?

  The odd thing I’ve noticed is that while of course the South is more and more indistinguishable from the rest of the country(Atlanta, for example, which has become one of the three or four megalopolises of the United States, is in fact, I’m told by blacks, their favorite American city), the fact is that, as Faulkner said fifty years ago, as soon as you cross the Mason-Dixon Line, you still know it. This, after fifty years of listening to the same radio and watching millions of hours of Barnaby Jones. I don’t know whether it’s the heat or a certain lingering civility, but people will slow down on interstates to let you get in traffic. Strangers speak in post offices, hold doors for each other without being thought queer or running a con game or making a sexual advance. I could have killed the last cab driver I had in New York. Ask Eudora Welty, she was in the same cab.

  Have your views concerning being a writer in the South undergone a change during the past decades? Is being a writer in the South in 1987 the same as it was when you started to write?

  Southern writers—that’s the question everybody asks. I still don’t know the answer. All I know is that there is still something about living in the South which turns one inward, makes one secretive, sly, and scheming, makes one capable of a degree of malice, humor, and outrageousness. At any rate, despite the Los Angelization of the South, there are right here, in the New Orleans area, perhaps half a dozen very promising young writers—which is more than can be said of Los Angeles. It comes, not from the famous storytelling gregariousness one hears about, but from the shy, sly young woman, say, who watches, listens, gets a fill of it, and slips off to do a number on it. And it comes, not from having arrived at last in the Great American Mainstream along with the likes of Emerson and Sandburg, but from being close enough to have a good look at one’s fellow Americans, fellow Southerners, yet keep a certain wary distance, enough to nourish a secret, subversive conviction: I can do a number on those guys—and on me—and it will be good for all of us.

  Apropos of Southern writing, does regionalism still apply?

  Sure, in the better sense of the word, in the sense that Chekhov and Flaubert and Mark Twain are regionalists—not in the sense that Joel Chandler Harris and Bret Harte were regionalists.

  You studied science at Chapel Hill and became a medical doctor at Columbia. In your recently published essay “The Diagnostic Novel” you suggest that serious art is “just as cognitive” as science is and “the serious novelist is quite as much concerned with discovering reality as a serious physicist.” Art explores reality in a way which “cannot be done any other way.” What are some of the ways that are specific to an artistic as opposed to a scientific exploration of reality?

  The most commonplace example of the cognitive dimension in fiction is the reader’s recognition—sometimes the shock of recognition—the “verification” of a sector of reality which he had known but not known that he had known. I think of letters I get from readers which may refer to a certain scene and say, in effect, yes! that’s the way it is! For example, Binx in The Moviegoer describes one moviegoing experience, going to see Panic in the Streets, a film shot in New Orleans, going to a movie theater in the very neighborhood where the same scenes in the movie were filmed. Binx tells his girlfriend Kate about his reasons for enjoying the film—that it, the film “certifies” the reality of the neighborhood in a peculiar sense in which the direct experience of the neighborhood, living in the neighborhood, does not. I have heard from many readers about this and other such scenes—as have other novelists, I’m sure—saying they know exactly what Binx is talking about. I think it is reasonable to call such a transaction cognitive, sciencing. This sort of sciencing is closely related to the cognitive dimension of psychoanalysis. The patient, let’s say, relates a dream. Such-and-such happened. The analyst suggests that perhaps the dream “means” such and such. It sometimes happens that the patient—perhaps after a pause, a frown, a shaking of head—will suddenly “see” it. Yes, by God! Which is to say: in sciencing, there are forms of verification other than pointer-readings.

  As for your view that it is a mistake to draw a moral and be edifying in art—is Lancelot’s naïve-fascistoid idea of the Third Revolution illustrative of this?

  I was speaking of the everyday use of the words “moral” and “edifying”—which is to say, preachy—in the sense that, say, Ayn Rand’s novels are preachy, have a message, but may in the deepest sense of the word be immoral. So is Lancelot’s “Third Revolution” in the deepest sense immoral and, I hope, is so taken by the reader. To tell the truth, I don’t see how any serious fiction-writer or poet can fail to be moral and edifying in the technical nonconnotative sense of these words, since he or she cannot fail to be informed by his own deep sense of the way things should be or should not be, by a sense of pathology and hence a sense of health. If a writer writes from a sense of outrage—and most serious writers do—isn’t he by definition a moral writer?

  The influence of Dostoevsky, Camus, Sartre, and other novelists upon you has often been discussed. Is there any literary influence that joined the rest recently?

  Chekhov reread—in a little reading group we have here in Covington. His stories “In the Ravine” and “Ward Number Six” are simply breathtaking. Also recently, the German novelist Peter Handke, whose latest, The Weight of the World, is somehow exhilarating in the spontaneity of its free-form diary entries. The accurate depiction of despair can be exhilarating, a cognitive emotion.

  What is your attitude toward the reader?

  I hold out for some sort of contractual relationship between novelist and reader, however flawed, misapprehended, or fragmentary. Perhaps the contract is ultimately narratological, perhaps not. But something keeps—or fails to keep—the reader reading the next sentence. Even the “anti-novel” presupposes some sort of contractual venture at the very moment the “anti-novelist” is attacking narrativity. Such a venture implies that the writer is up to something, going abroad like Don Quixote—if only to attack windmills—and that the reader is with him. Otherwise, why would the latter bother? The anti-novelist is like a Protestant. His protests might be valid, but where would he be without the Catholic Church? I have no objection to “anti-story” novels. What I object to is any excursion by the author which violates the novelistic contract between writer and reader, which I take to be an intersubjective transaction entailing the transmission of a set of symbols, a text. The writer violates the contract when he trashes the reader by pornography or scatological political assaults, e.g., depicting President Nixon in a novel buggering Ethel Rosenberg in Times Square, or L.B.J. plotting the assassination of J.F.K. Take pornography, a difficult, slippery case. It is not necessary to get into a discussion of First Amendment rights—for all I know, it has them. And, for all I know, pornography has its uses. All I suggest is that pornography and literature stimulate different organs. If we can agree that a literary text is a set of signals transmitted from sender to receiver in a certain code, pornography is a different set of signals and a different code.

  Can it be said that in your case the primary business of literature and art is cognitive, whereas with John Gardner it is to “be morally judgmental”? It is clear that you and Gardner are not talking about the same thing.

  I expect there is an overlap between Gardner’s “moral fiction” and my “diagnostic novel.” But Gardner makes me nervous with
his moralizing. When he talks about literature “establishing models of human action,” he seems to be using literature to influence what people do. I think he is confusing two different orders of reality. Aquinas and the Schoolmen were probably right: art is making; morality is doing. Art is a virtue of the practical intellect, which is to say making something. This is not to say that art, fiction, is not moral in the most radical sense—if it is made right. But if you write a novel with the goal of trying to make somebody do right, you’re writing a tract—which may be an admirable enterprise, but it is not literature. Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground is in my opinion a work of art, but it would probably not pass Gardner’s moral test. Come to think of it, I think my reflexes are medical rather than moral. This comes, I guess, from having been a pathologist. Now, I am perfectly willing to believe Flannery O’Connor when she said, and she wasn’t kidding, that the modern world is a territory largely occupied by the devil. No one doubts the malevolence abroad in the world. But the world is also deranged. What interests me as a novelist is not the malevolence of man—so what else is new?—but his looniness. The looniness, that is to say, of the “normal” denizen of the Western world who, I think it fair to say, doesn’t know who he is, what he believes, or what he is doing. This unprecedented state of affairs is, I suggest, the domain of the “diagnostic” novelist.

  Are there any trends or authors in contemporary American innovative fiction that you regard with sympathy?

  Yes, there are quite a few younger writers whom I will not name but whom I would characterize as innovative “minimalist” writers who have been influenced by Donald Barthelme without succumbing to him, which is easy to do, or as young Southern writers who have been influenced by Faulkner and Welty without succumbing to them, which is also easy to do.