DIAGNOSIS COMES AS SECOND nature to Walker Percy. Trained as a physician, Percy's own confinement as a tuberculosis patient during his medical internship was instrumental in his second career as a writer.
His first novel, The Moviegoer, follows the restless ponderings of a young stockbroker living in a suburb of New Orleans. The winner of the 1962 National Book Award, The Moviegoer (and Percy's novels to come) describes the spiritual malaise of the 20th century against the backdrop of the passing experience of the old South's mystery and manners.
A convert to Catholicism, Percy is a 20th-century writer serving witness to this century's intellectual life as well as its grim chapters of history.
Combining his avocation as a scholar of semiotics (the study of symbols) with his use of the novel form, Percy's work has continued to reflect his critique of scientific progress as it infiltrates into an increasingly homogenized, technologized popular culture.
Readers of Percy's novels can look forward to each story being characteristically rendered in a unique, ironic voice, filled with droll commentary as well as political, religious, and social allegory, and an unending search to name the age in which we live.
As an allegorist, Percy possesses such a penetrating sense of satire, social critic Robert Coles declared simply: "Walker Percy is a gift."
In Lost in the Cosmos, a 1984 collection of non-fiction essays, Percy takes on the conventional wisdom of the day -- a meld of media, New Age philosophy, and superficial scientism -- producing a thought-provoking and often hilarious antithesis to the euphemistic answers of the television age.
In Percy's most recent novel, The Thanatos Syndrome, the character Dr. Thomas More stumbles on a plot among local scientists to cure the social ills of the commonweal by technological means -- loading the water supply with the chemical heavy sodium. In More's struggle to penetrate a conspiracy of silence and at the same time discover his own rightful place as a scientist, the author posits a most challenging thesis about genocide in the modern age and contemporary scientific mores.
In an unending search to diagnose the dangers of our age, Percy's last two novels, The Second Coming and The Thanatos Syndrome, have specifically concerned themselves with the post-Christian West as a culture of death. Percy's protagonists' encounters with other wanderers provide comic relief as well as a way to open up to a more serious antidote.
To the discerning reader, hidden within Percy's powerful critique are subtle and allusive signs of grace.
-- Brent Short
Sojourners: In your novels, you seem to render a diagnosis for the age and the people in it. How has your medical background influenced you as a writer?
Walker Percy: Some people think that the two vocations -- being first a physician, then ending up as a novelist -- couldn't be more different. I find it very useful to use the same stance. The stance of the physician is that of a diagnostician. The premise, the presumption, is that when you see a patient, something is wrong. The question is, What's gone wrong, and how do you find out to make a diagnosis?
I find that extremely useful in dealing with the present age. Something's clearly wrong, maybe even worse than usual in civilizations. I find it a natural stance from which to write both novels and non-fiction.
Sojourners: Your novels and essays contain a great deal of comic satire of science, but a great love of and respect for science come through as well. Would it be possible to separate you as a novelist from Walker Percy the scientist?
Percy: Well, I hope not. I don't think the two are mutually exclusive. I don't have any quarrel with science. What the sciences do, they do very well.
The trouble is, the sciences for the last 200 years have been spectacularly successful in dealing with subhuman reality -- chemistry and physics of matter -- with extraordinary progress in learning about the cosmos, but also extraordinary lack of success in dealing with humanity as humanity. I think it's very curious that the scientist knows a tremendous amount about everything except what he or she is. Despite the extraordinary successes of science, we do not presently have even the rudiments of a coherent science of humanity.
Sojourners: In The Thanatos Syndrome, the forces of death seem to be masquerading in the guise of social betterment. Do you think by naming or describing those forces, one comes closer to coming to grips with the contemporary predicament?
Percy: The old, addled priest who is holed up in a firetower says it in his own peculiar way. He observes that the society has learned a great deal, everything seems to be going pretty well, some guys have discovered that heavy sodium seems to cure the contemporary ills -- reduces the number of teenage pregnancies, reduces depression and anxiety, and seems to help people get along better. The trouble is, people are beginning to act more and more like subhuman primates.
The priest goes back to the fact -- and this is the central point of the book -- that the evils of the Nazis did not begin with the Nazis. The Nazis didn't come out of nowhere. They came out of the German Democratic Republic, the Weimar Republic -- one of the most democratic in Western Europe. The Weimar doctors, not the Nazi doctors, wrote a book called The Defense of Destruction of Life Without Value.
The criterion became what you hear so often now -- "quality of life." If the quality of life is not good, why not get rid of it? This is quite reasonable, absent the Judeo-Christian ethic. If one can dispense with the scandalous Christian proposition that each human being is created by God, and accordingly sacred, one can quite reasonably use the criterion of the quality of life for all people.
First, get rid of malformed children, then get rid of old people, anybody. If the quality of life is bad, what is wrong with terminating it for the benefit of the person suffering, for the benefit of the family that is going through a lot of trouble, for the benefit of the state because it's extremely expensive?
I was making a not-too-subtle suggestion that once you cross the barrier of the destruction of human life, you're on the slope. I don't see how it ends short of how the Weimar Republic ends. The Nazis come in, and if the majority of the people come to believe that the Jews -- or the gypsies, or the Hispanics, or the blacks -- are bad and undesirable, then what is wrong with getting rid of them? Once the barrier is crossed, I don't see what hinders what the Germans called "the final solution."
It was a somewhat shocking thesis for a novel -- and not really picked up by a lot of people, because you can't do that in a novel. A novel had better not be caught preaching or edifying. It's okay to be satirical and funny. But if there's a heavy message, it better be concealed. So I conceal it in the mouth of a nutty, old priest.
Sojourners: Your novels are often described and discussed as novels of ideas, but most novelists find that their fictional characters take on a life of their own. Has this been your experience?
Percy: That's the best thing that could happen to a novelist. If the characters are vehicles, mouthpieces for your own ideas, you're in trouble, you're going to write a bad novel. The best way to create a novel is to create a character. Naturally, if you create characters, they're going to be "informed" by the way you see life and the nature of human beings. But then you turn them loose, and you find them doing all sorts of things. That's the freedom the novelist hopes for.
Sojourners: You seem to present the signs of grace in your work in a way that leaves it up to the reader as to how to take them, and what exactly to discern from them. What is your intention by doing it that way?
Percy: Trying to get away with it. If you get caught writing a "religious" novel -- about God, Judaism, Christianity -- you are dead. You'll be read by a few people. As one of my characters, Binx Boiling in The Moviegoer, says, "Whenever anyone says God to me, a curtain goes down in my head."
I have to be careful when I talk about grace. I have to be extremely allusive. I think Caroline Gordon said, "The novelist is entitled to use every trick of deceit and underhandedness at his or her control."
Sojourners: How does one go about writing about Christian faith in a culture in which the language of faith has been discredited and devalued?
Percy: That is the problem. And it's getting worse, because the language of Christianity is increasingly discredited -- mainly by the media and the TV preachers. They've given us all a bad name. You do the best you can with it, usually by avoiding the words or using other words.
Sojourners: In your background, there was a bout with tuberculosis during medical school?
Percy: Yes, I was interning at Bellevue, a big charity hospital in New York City. I was working with tuberculosis cases, doing all the autopsies in pathology. I just picked it up that way. It was noticed on a routine X-ray; I never had any symptoms.
I had to take the classic rest cure. That was before there was chemotherapy. I had the classic experience of Hans Kostoff in The Magic Mountain, which was a turnaround in his life. It was certainly a revolution in mine. If it hadn't been for that, I'd probably be a second-class psychiatrist in Birmingham.
Sojourners: How did that time of recovery affect the "cure" you allude to in your novels?
Percy: It was valuable to me, and I used it later in various ways. Most of the time we are not what we really are. We are some distance away, not really ourselves. There is a paradox: One is most one's self usually not when one's needs are satisfied, but under conditions of catastrophe.
My character in The Moviegoer, Binx Boiling, said the time he was most himself was when he had been shot in the Korean War; when he was that close to death, all of a sudden he was most alive. Actually, I think I swiped that from Tolstoy, when he had his character Prince Andrei at a Napoleonic battle about to get killed, maybe badly wounded. All of a sudden he realizes for the first time what it is to be human, what it is to be alive, what it is to be himself.
In Louisiana we have hurricanes. My theory is that people enjoy hurricanes, whether they say so or not. In a hurricane terrible things are happening, but there is a certain exhilaration. It comes from a peculiar sense of self, the vividness.
As Einstein said, "Life is dreary as hell." Somebody asked him why he went into quantum mechanics. Well, to get away from the dreariness of life. Louisianans enjoy hurricanes, if they're not too bad.
Sojourners: Despite their outward appearance of success as doctors, lawyers, scientists, all your protagonists -- all Southern gentlemen -- seem unsatisfied with life in conventional society. Would you say that is one of the central dilemmas you try to address?
Percy: Yes. And it relates to your question about the relationship -- between being a Christian and being a novelist. Some people would think of the two as antithetical. But I find it extremely valuable being a Catholic. (It can also apply to any Christian church or to Judaism.) The peculiar Christian notion of humanity as wayfarer, as pilgrim, in search, in quest, is of course the very essence of the novel. The novel is about somebody in trouble, in a predicament.
As Binx Boiling says, he undertook the search when he came to himself on the battlefield and realized who he was, with this very vivid sense of being human. The rest of his life was devoted to the search, and not to the standard secular practice of satisfying one's needs or achieving one's life goals -- or "growing as a person" (a favorite expression these days).
I wonder how many books have been written about growing as a person. That may be useful, but it doesn't work very well in a novel. But the idea of humanity in quest, humanity in search, doesn't have to have any great revelation, any great conversion. It doesn't have to end up like St. Paul knocked off his horse. It's the idea of the quest which is very useful to a novelist.
So, the two backgrounds have been so useful -- the background as physician, diagnostician, recognizing that something's wrong with the world; and the anthropology of Christianity, seeing humanity as the creature something has gone wrong with. If humanity has any sense and comes to itself, we will spend our time searching for what happened, searching for the answer.
Sojourners: What kind of impact and influence do social planners and theorists, who measure society in quantifiable terms, have on contemporary culture? Does that create its own ethos?
Percy: The practice is easy to criticize, but it's certainly not bad. A social planner is trying to plan some way that the state and society can take care of, or better the situation of, those who are in a terrible situation, terrible trouble -- the deprived, including minorities and the homeless. There's certainly everything to be praised about planning for betterment.
The danger is from the point of view of the individual. Our culture is informed by a kind of popular scientific notion of "the experts." They are those who know -- not only know, but owe it to us to make things better. If you come to the point where you are relying on "the experts" -- on the scientists to give you the answers to your life or the social planners to get you out of the mess you're in -- that's unfortunate to the degree that it destroys one's own initiative.
Sojourners: You seem to make a distinction between science and scientism.
Percy: Oh, yes. It's not my distinction, but I think it's quite true. Science is fine for what it does; for what it does, it's magnificent.
The idea of scientism is a cultural transmission of a notion of science for the popular mind in which they -- "the experts" -- have all the answers. Of course, the answers are abstractions. As Kierkegaard would say, they cannot utter one word to me about what if is to be born, to live or die.
Scientism has been called a misplacement of reality -- from the reality of one's self and individual things to the notion of abstractions where things or selves are simply exemplars of this or that theory or abstraction.
Sojourners: You've been quoted as saying, "If the first great intellectual discovery of my life was the beauty of the scientific method, surely the second was the discovery of the singular predicament of humanity in the very world which has been transformed by science." Does that still hold true?
Percy: You don't have to be a sage or a prophet to point out the fact that the 20th century, which should have been the greatest triumph of civilization of all time -- the triumph of science, technology, consumership -- has been the most murderous century in all of history. More people were killed by each other -- 20 million in the first big war, and I think 40 or 50 million killed in the second -- than from all other causes since then. It's an interesting paradox for a writer to think about.
Brent Short was a librarian at the Catholic University of America and a freelance writer in Washington, D.C., when this article appeared. He interviewed Walker Percy for Sojourners when Percy was in Washington to deliver the Jefferson Lecture at the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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