Fyodor Dostoevsky, Walker Percy, and the Age of Suicide 0813231272, 9780813231273

Citation preview

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Walker Percy, and the Age of Suicide

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Walker Percy, and the Age of Suicide John F. Desmond

The Catholic University of America Press     Washington, D.C.

Copyright © 2019 The Catholic University of America Press All rights reserved The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standards for Information Science—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. ∞ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Desmond, John F., author. Title: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Walker Percy, and the age of suicide / John F. Desmond. Description: Washington, D.C. : The Catholic University of America Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018030454 | ISBN 9780813231273 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Suicide in literature. | Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 1821–1881—Criticism and interpretation. | Percy, Walker, 1916–1990—Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC PN56.S744 D47 2019 | DDC 809.3/93548—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018030454

To Linda, with love and gratitude

Contents

Acknowledgments / ix

Introduction 1 Part 1. Fyodor Dostoevsky 1. Dostoevsky and the Road to Suicide

27

2. Notes on Notes from Underground 40 3. Crime and Punishment: A Modern Case

57

4. The Idiot: Christ without Christ

73

5. Demons: A Cautionary Tale

96

6. The Brothers Karamazov: Of Darkness and Light

117

Part 2. Walker Percy 7. Walker Percy and the Age of Suicide

139

8. The Moviegoer: Skirting the Abyss

154

9. The Last Gentleman: Homeward Bound

176

10. Lancelot: What Do Survivors Do?

196

11. The Second Coming: Finding Home

221

12. Love in the Ruins and The Thanatos Syndrome: Cautionary Tales

248

Epilogue: Beyond Suicide

279

Selected Bibliography / 285 Index / 291

   vii

Acknowledgments

I owe an incalculable debt of gratitude to the hundreds of Dostoevsky and Percy scholars who have made this work possible. While they are too numerous to name individually, I wish to offer special thanks to Joseph Frank, Romano Guardini, Rene Girard, Charles Taylor, and James Alison for their wisdom and insight, especially on Dostoevsky. Among Percy scholars, I owe a special debt to the work of Lewis A. Lawson, Patrick Samway, SJ, Lewis Simpson, Martin Luschei, Gary Ciuba, and Edward Dupuy. Professors Ciuba and Dupuy have offered steady encouragement and friendship on my journey through this project, for which I am deeply grateful. I wish to commend Aldene Fredenburg for her superb editing of the book and Theresa Walker for her editorial assistance. I want to thank Rhoda Faust for her generosity and support. I want also to thank the original reviewers of this book manuscript and director Trevor Lipscombe and the editorial staff of the Catholic University of America Press for their generosity and skill in marshaling this project to completion and publication.

   ix

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Walker Percy, and the Age of Suicide

Introduction Introduction

Introduction

We fear the thought of suicide, and yet we need to think about it, if we can, because one of the characteristics of our time is precisely that it is a suicidal age.   —Thomas Merton, Confessions of a Guilty Bystander

In the preface to his monumental study Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time, Joseph Frank argues that Dostoevsky’s writings are in large part “inspired by the ideological doctrines of his time.” Furthermore, he claims that “such doctrines, particularly in his major works, furnish the chief motivations for the often bizarre, eccentric and occasionally murderous behavior of (his) characters” and that they “cannot really be understood unless we grasp how their actions are intertwined with ideological motivations.” Viewing Dostoevsky’s writings from a perspective many decades after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, Frank asserts that “his greatest works had been efforts to undermine the ideological foundations out of which that revolution sprang.”1 Frank does not wish to imply, of course, that Dostoevsky’s stories are merely ideological tracts dressed up as fiction. Rather, he recognizes Dostoevsky’s ability to dramatize ideas as a distinctive feature of his genius. A similar ability to dramatize ideas and create unique characters whose actions “are intertwined with ideological motivations” can be claimed for Walker Percy. And, like Dostoevsky, Percy’s greatest works reveal his effort to undermine the ideological assumptions he saw dominating Western cul1. Joseph Frank, preface, in Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time, ed. Mary Petrusewicz (Princeton, N.J., and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), xiii–xiv.

1

ture, particularly American culture, in the twentieth century. Dostoevsky’s influence on Percy has been widely acknowledged by Percy scholars and by Percy himself.2 Asked to name his “most significant” philosophical transition as a writer, he answered “from Tolstoy to Dostoevsky.” 3 Commenting on Dostoevsky’s broad cultural importance, he called The Brothers Karamazov “maybe the greatest novel of all time” and said that “the novel almost prophesies and prefigures everything—all the bloody mess and issues of the twentieth century.” In fact, as we shall see, in his major novels Dostoevsky clearly anticipated Percy’s primary concern: the predicament of the self in modern and postmodern society. Percy went on to emphasize how Ivan Karamazov’s famous remark—“‘If God does not exist, all things are permitted’—explains so much of what has happened in this century with the rise of all these ideologies.” 4 Elsewhere, reflecting on the horrors of the twentieth century, he added, “But not even Dostoevsky imagined what man without God was capable of.” 5 One of the things “permitted” if God does not exist, as Dostoevsky and Percy saw, is suicide. There are many instances of actual, attempted, or contemplated suicide in both writers’ works. Suicide, of course, is a common theme in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian, European, and American fiction. We think immediately of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and many other novels and plays. What is unique in Dostoevsky and in different ways in Percy is the extent to which the suicides are linked directly or indirectly to the major ideological issues—religious, philosophical, and political—of the times. Beyond the individual tragedies and near tragedies recorded in the novels, Dostoevsky linked suicide directly to a broad cultural ethos he saw emerging in the latter half of nineteenth-century Russia, a threatening nihilism about which he wrote extensively in his Diary. Percy saw an even more pervasive ethos of suicide in twentieth-century Western culture, 2. Jay Tolson, Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 108, 165, 216–17. 3. Lewis A. Lawson and Victor A. Kramer, eds., More Conversations with Walker Percy (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993), 63, 224. 4. Ibid., 224. 5. Ibid., 203.

2 

Introduction

which he identified as a “thanatos syndrome” in his last novel. In an interview with Phil McComb, Percy said, “Dr. More (protagonist of The Thanatos Syndrome) said that the age of thanatos began with the Battle of the Somme and the Battle of Verdun in 1916 when we had this paradox of the flower of European civilization, European humanism, and European Christendom beginning to commit suicide. People were killed not by the millions, but by the tens of millions.6 Consequently, it is possible to speak in broad terms of the period beginning roughly with World War I and on into our more advanced technological age as an “age of suicide.” When he spoke of the suicidal warfare in World War I and the other twentieth-century human catastrophes (World War II, the Holocaust, nuclear weapons), Percy was not just thinking of actual historical events. These events, terrible as they were (and are), were for him signs of a deeper spiritual malaise, an existential death wish manifested in a sense of alienation and despair, often unrecognized by its victims, that had seeped into the marrow of Western society, sapping it of life. Anthropologist Rene Girard, as we shall see, referred to this condition as one of “ontological sickness.” 7 Before Percy, Dostoevsky had prophetically witnessed to the onset of this spiritual malaise in many of his novels and stories, as we shall see. In the years between Dostoevsky and Percy, many other writers from Kafka to Camus also recognized the signs of this malaise. For example, Albert Camus, always an important influence on Percy, pictured the general malaise in the opening description of the city of Oran, a self-enclosed city in The Plague, where the citizens spend the bulk of their time pursuing diversions and waiting for death. The actual plague that invades Oran is an outward sign of the pervasive spiritual ennui that has already stricken its citizens. And in The Fall, Camus’s narrator sarcastically remarks that “a single sentence will suffice for modern man: ‘he fornicated and read the papers.’ ” 8 Likewise, Dostoevsky and Percy witnessed to this general atmosphere of growing despair; for both writers, the actual suicides and the suicidal be6. Ibid., 191–92 (my addition). 7. See, for example, Rene Girard’s seminal explanation of triangular desire in chap. 1 of his Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and the Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 1–52. 8. Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Modern Library, 1947), 3–6; Camus, The Fall, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Random House Vintage, 1956), 6.

 

Introduction 

3

havior in their works are dramatic signs of a society increasingly under the sway of ideologies that are destructive to the individual person and to society. But at the same time, both Dostoevsky and Percy express a resilient, if faint, hope for the spiritual renewal of those few individuals who come to humbly recognize their spiritual predicament, reject despair, and emerge from trials and sufferings to become what Percy called “ex-suicides,” stronger and more integrated human beings.

6 My purpose in this study is twofold. First, I plan to examine the cultural ethos of suicide as represented in the major writings of Dostoevsky and Percy. To justify my claim that a suicidal cultural ethos exists in their work, I enlist the support of four important thinkers whose seminal writings directly and indirectly support my thesis about the meaning of suicide in the two novelists’ writings. These four thinkers are Søren Kierkegaard, Rene Girard, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Charles Taylor. These writers will, from different points of view, provide an intellectual and historical context for my interpretation of the two novelists and help illuminate the theme of the age of suicide in their work. Although these thinkers are unique in their approaches and writings, one important perspective they share is their sharp criticism and rejection of any belief in autonomous individualism as a coherent vision of modern society. Dostoevsky and Percy share the same critical understanding. One of the challenges of writing about suicide in modern culture and about an “age of suicide” is that since the Enlightenment the meaning and significance of suicide have changed and been degraded over the past few centuries. Traditional Christianity considered—and still considers—suicide to be essentially a direct offense against God, a sin of despair that rejects the Holy Spirit and God as the creator of all life. Under this traditional belief, suicide was understood in a metaphysical-theological perspective—that is, in terms of the primacy of ontological truth authored by God the divine Logos. The same is hardly the case today, except among orthodox Christian believers. In our more tolerant, pluralistic culture, notions of ontology and metaphysics have been submerged by a culture focused almost exclusively on immanent realities and concerns. Suicide is now viewed largely from a sociological/psychological perspective, disciplines that con-

4 

Introduction

centrate on proximate causes such as depression, PTSD, opioid addiction, failing health, joblessness, family troubles, and bullying. Rarely is suicide spoken of as an offense against God or the order of being. In contrast, Dostoevsky’s character Kirilov in Demons commits suicide as a direct, explicit challenge to God, which is probably why Percy once referred to him as an “honest” suicide. Albert Camus thought of Kirilov in the same way.9 In The Second Coming, protagonist Will Barrett also mounts an explicit challenge to God via attempted suicide, but he fails. It is difficult to imagine a suicide victim in contemporary society as making the fatal choice based on a self-conscious, deliberate, and explicit challenge to God, à la Kirilov or Will Barrett. Suicide—whether in earlier dominantly Christian times or modern times—remains an ineluctable ontological mystery, beyond the reach of modernity’s best scientific analyses. It enjoins silence, a withholding of judgment in favor of empathy and mercy, especially since we as moderns no longer seem to have the intellectual or moral tools to fully comprehend its depths of meaning. To paraphrase an idea expressed by author Flannery O’Connor, we mark our gain in sensitivity by our loss in vision.10 Yet paradoxically, while the traditional meanings of suicide have eroded over time, the prevalence of suicide in Western culture, especially among the youth, has increased to near epidemic proportions. To justify my claim that a cultural ethos of suicide can be seen in Dostoevsky’s and Percy’s writings, I turn initially to Søren Kierkegaard, a seminal influence on Percy’s thought and art. Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death provides an anthropological, psychological, and religious foundation for understanding both Dostoevsky’s and Percy’s fundamental view of man and the modern spiritual predicament. Any serious discussion of that predicament, which I see as suicidal in the broad sense, must begin with Kierkegaard’s basic claim that human nature—the self—is a “synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and eternal, of freedom and necessity.” 11 This metaphysical view of human nature presupposes that the hu9. Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Random House Vintage, 1959), 77–83. 10. Flannery O’Connor, Collected Works (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1988), 830–31. 11. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death, trans. with an introduction by Walter Lowrie (1941; repr. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955), 146.

 

Introduction 

5

man self is by its very nature immortal. As Christian believers, both Dostoevsky and Percy accepted this basic anthropological view. Kierkegaard argued that “man is spirit” and “spirit is the self” and further explains, rather circuitously, that “the self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation (which accounts for it) that the relation relates itself to its own self.” 12 Stated differently, to be a fully human “self” is to become self-conscious of oneself as a synthesis or “a relation between two factors” (infinite/finite; eternal/temporal; freedom/necessity). Percy frequently referred to Kierkegaard’s assertion that the self’s “task is to become itself, a task which can be performed only by means of a (transparent) relationship to God.” Kierkegaard concludes, “So regarded, ‘man is not (yet) a self.’ ” 13 Furthermore, since the self is a synthesis of freedom/necessity, it can choose whether to strive to become fully human. To reject or avoid the struggle is to refuse to “become a self” and, instead, to live “unconsciously,” either in defiance of the challenge or by avoiding it in favor of diversions or various escapes, both of which are forms of despair. Despair is the condition of not willing to become a self.14 Stated differently, one way to reject the challenge to become a fully human self is to allow oneself to be “defrauded by others.” One can passively accept the superficial identity or role imposed by others, such as by physicians, psychotherapists, gurus, the media, or other stereotyping social groups. Alternatively, one can also defiantly rebel against discovering oneself “transparently under God” and attempt to assert one’s radical autonomy; in the worst case, the self can succumb to possession by “demoniac” impulses.15 Both forms of refusal are despair, a condition of what I refer to as “spiritual suicide.” The ultimate refusal of the challenge to become a true self is, of course, actual suicide. This refusal of faith in the possibility of self-realization “transparently under God” is for Kierkegaard the greatest sin against the spirit.16 Kierkegaard maintained that the essence of religious faith to become a fully human self is a subjective relation to God. The self’s identity “transparently under God” is an individual challenge each must face. It requires a 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 162, 143 (my additions). 14. Ibid., 185, 195–99. 15. Ibid., 166, 175, 205–7. 16. Ibid., 179–82, 208–13.

6 

Introduction

“leap of faith” in the face of the absurd, a choice he saw best exemplified in Abraham’s obedience to God’s “absurd” command to sacrifice his son and heir, Isaac. Percy did not fully agree with Kierkegaard’s insistence upon the total subjectivity of the self’s relationship to God. For Percy, and I believe for Dostoevsky as well, Kierkegaard’s extreme view of the individual’s subjective quest to become a true self under God lacked a social dimension. That is, Percy believed the quest or search for a fully human self was carried out within the human community, primarily through our use of language signs. The self, for Percy, cannot come to know itself by itself. The quest is mediated in our relations with others, especially in intersubjective, loving relationships with others, union with an other in what Percy called a solitude a deux.17 For him, too great an emphasis on subjectivity ran the risk of solipsism and alienation from one’s immediate historical situation—that is, from the predicament of being a self-conscious person with relationships to others in the everyday world. Along with philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, Percy believed that we are by nature communal beings and that our search to become true selves is shaped, but not entirely determined, by our relations with fellow human beings, within the dialectic of freedom/necessity Kierkegaard ascribed to fundamental human nature. Kierkegaard’s basic understanding that the “self is spirit” or a synthesis of spirit and flesh, qualified by Percy’s understanding of the self as basically social, can be further understood through the anthropological perspective of Rene Girard. Girard’s theory of mimetic desire is well-known, but warrants a brief review here as it pertains to the subject of my book. According to Girard, individual human beings and human social groups are driven by the mechanism of imitative desire. We are not autonomous selves. Individuals and cultures develop by imitating others’ desires; for Girard, it is the founding principle of human culture. We do not necessarily desire what others desire; rather, we imitate their mode of desiring itself. The relationship is a triangular one, not directed to the object itself but to the rival’s desire for it. All desire is mediated in this way. Mimetic desire creates a rivalrous situation marked by competition, envy, jealousy, and hatred that eventually escalates into violence against the rival other(s)—to 17. Lawson and Kramer, More Conversations, 57.

 

Introduction 

7

murder, warfare, and general social chaos. The archetypal biblical example Girard points to in this regard is the story of Cain and Abel.18 Mimetic rivalry within or between social groups threatens to destroy civilization in suicidal fashion unless some way is discovered to resolve the crisis of disorder. Historically, human societies have resolved such crises by selecting a scapegoat or scapegoats upon whom the “evils” of the community are projected. The scapegoat figure is then sacrificed, either by death or expulsion, as for example in the myth of Oedipus. Thus order is restored to the community, but only temporarily. Imitative desire, rivalry, and violence are so engrained in human nature that the pattern is repeated cyclically throughout history, both literally and in mythic sacrificial rituals found in almost all cultures. The question always underlying Girard’s profound analysis is: how is it possible to escape the vicious historical cycle of violence that has brought civilization to the brink of self-destruction—that is, to universal catastrophic suicide? Girard argues that there is only one decisive rupture in this cyclical historical pattern of mimetic rivalry and violence: the pattern established by Christ’s incarnation, death on the cross, and bodily resurrection. Because Jesus was an innocent victim, the one who preached nonviolence, forgiveness, love of enemies, and peace, his sacrifice broke the cyclical pattern of reciprocal violence. It established in human history a new pattern of possible transformation of human beings and a way to transcend the natural compulsion toward murderous rivalry. Put in simplified form, the answer for Girard is that human beings must model themselves on the only perfect model for the self (and for Kierkegaard the perfect model for the fully human self)—Christ the God-man and innocent victim who rejected self-autonomy by following the will of his Father in heaven and by giving his life for all mankind. Any other model of imitative desire is doomed to idolatry and disaster for both the individual and civilization. As we shall see, both Dostoevsky and Percy offer a similar redemptive model in their fiction. In his important book I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, Girard explains further how his theory of mimetic desire undercuts any ideology based on 18. Rene Girard refers in many works to the Cain-Abel story as the archetypal founding murder; see, for example, Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2001), 83–85.

8 

Introduction

a belief in personal autonomy and individualism. He argues that radical individualism “presupposes the total autonomy of individuals, that is, the autonomy of their desires.” 19 Mimetic desire leads inevitably to self-idolatry and selfish assertion of the will-to-power; the delusion of our radical “independence” fosters spiritual isolation and despair.

6 Girard’s anthropological-historical approach can be seen as apposite the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, the founder of modern semiotics and an important influence on Walker Percy. I have discussed the Percy-Peirce relationship in my book Walker Percy’s Search for Community.20 One can see similarities between Girard’s concept of imitative desire and Peirce’s belief that human beings are constituted by nature as relational beings. For Peirce, the basic truth of human existence is that of our relations through language signs. We live within an objectively real, nonmaterial web of sign relations, a semiotic community that belies any notion of radically autonomous selves.21 As human, symbol-making beings we are interdependent, not independent. The contrary view, the belief in autonomous individualism, refuted by both Girard and Peirce, is a corrupt derivative of Descartes’s dualism, his separation of mind from external reality. Percy, following Peirce, argued that our fundamental human condition as self-conscious beings is a social reality grounded in sign-relations: “What Descartes did not know: no such isolated individual as he described can be conscious.” 22 The Percy-Peirce connection, like the Girard-Peirce connection, is important to this book because it affords a way to establish a link between the anthropological, philosophical, and theological underpinnings of Percy’s writings and, retrospectively, I believe, to Dostoevsky’s major novels as well. Peirce was a philosophical realist who affirmed two types of sign relations: dyadic and triadic. Dyadic interactions are cause-effect exchanges, as between physical objects. Triadic relations, on the other hand, are semiotic communications of meaning between human beings that involve three elements: the sign, its object, and its interpretant. As Percy argued, all tri19. Ibid., 8. 20. John F. Desmond, Walker Percy’s Search for Community (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 16–36. 21. Ibid., 19. 22. Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), 108.

 

Introduction 

9

adic events “characteristically involve symbols and symbol-users and cannot be reduced to a series of dyadic relations.” 23 Triadic relations through language are the essence of intersubjective relations and of community in general. Following Peirce, Percy argued that signs are “open-ended”; they evolve over time and are subject to transformations of meaning, to decay, and to revitalization. Percy stated that he intended to use Peirce’s triadic theory of meaning and community as a way to create a “new anthropology,” a theory of man by virtue of which man is understood by his very nature to be open to “kerygma and news.” 24 As I stated in my book, “Peirce’s view of the open-ended, unlimited nature of genuine community reinforced from a philosophical perspective Percy’s religious belief in the human community evolving through history and time toward some ultimate form of redemption.” 25 In short, Percy attempted to synthesize Peirce’s theory of triadic relations with the basic doctrines of his Catholic faith.

6 My brief excursions into some basic ideas of Kierkegaard, Girard, and Peirce may seem a long way from the fictions of Dostoevsky and Percy and the theme of an age of suicide. Nevertheless, I believe they provide an essential philosophical and religious context for a deeper understanding of both writers’ examinations of the phenomena of isolation, alienation, violence, despair, and social chaos in modern culture—the potentially suicidal predicament faced by individuals and by civilization in general. To their relevant insights I add those of a fourth thinker, philosopher Charles Taylor. Taylor’s monumental and profound seminal work Sources of the Self traces the evolution of the modern self from its intellectual roots in the Greeks and Romans (Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, the Epicureans), through the early and late Middle Ages and the Renaissance (St. Augustine, Bacon, Descartes, Pascal), the Enlightenment philosophers and the Romantics (Locke, Shaftsbury, Hume, Rousseau, Kant), to the major nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers (Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Weber, Heidegger, Habermas) and 23. Percy, “Toward a Triadic Theory of Meaning,” in The Message in the Bottle (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975),162. 24. Walker Percy and Kenneth Laine Ketner, A Thief of Peirce: The Letters of Kenneth Laine Ketner and Walker Percy (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 131. 25. Desmond, Walker Percy’s Search for Community, 23.

10 

Introduction

many others.26 Given the breadth and depth of Taylor’s study, it is impossible to do justice to his complicated, nuanced arguments here. Nevertheless, I want to point to a few of his major themes that intersect with Kierkegaard, Girard, and Peirce’s viewpoints to shed additional light on Dostoevky’s and Percy’s fictions. Through his careful analysis of the writings of the major thinkers previously listed, Taylor traces the gradual shift from belief in a God-centered universe to belief in a modern social and moral order characterized by a plurality of overlapping and competing ideologies. This broad development marked a decline in or rejection of what Taylor calls an “ontic Logos,” the religious belief that God governed the universe through his Providence and ruled over humanity’s development and destiny.27 Paradoxically, a crucial figure in this shift or development was St. Augustine, who in his Confessions argued that the individual’s relationship to God was to be discerned and worked out not by examining and trying to understand one’s place in the external universal order ruled by God’s exalted Providence, but by a search for the mysterious God within one’s own heart and mind. Taylor calls this the “move toward inwardness,” a crucial shift that opened the door to greater emphasis on the individual’s unique moral sovereignty before God and to the importance of self-reflexive thinking and the subjective self, a crucial source of the modern self.28 As Taylor’s study amply develops, this crucial shift heralded the emerging emphasis on individual autonomy and human subjectivity as seen, for example, in Descartes and later in Kierkegaard. Implicit in the shift away from belief in the “ontic Logos” was a rupture between the religious consciousness and the ethical sense. With the weakening or fading of belief in the religious, greater emphasis came to be placed on individual freedom and social responsibility and one’s feelings for others, for sympathy and benevolence. As the focus on metaphysical ontology and the divine Godhead receded, emphasis grew on man’s immanent existence and ethical obligations. But this liberation from the traditional theological and metaphysi26. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 1–24. 27. Ibid., 144, 187–88. 28. Ibid., 122–42.

 

Introduction 

11

cal frame of understanding came with a heavy price, as Taylor points out. The price exacted in the shift in focus to man’s immanent condition and his capacity for self-development was a certain “loss of the numinous,” a sense of the “closing off” of the spiritual world or, to use Weber’s term, a “disenchantment” of reality and a loss of epistemological coherence, abetted by the increasing fragmentation of the meaning of language—a general situation spurred by the various and often competing ideologies of rationalism, skepticism, individualism, subjectivism, secular humanism, and, by the end of the nineteenth century, scientism and nihilism.29 Moreover, under the new dispensations that emphasized individual autonomy and the power of reason and self-determination, the danger emerged that these emphases could easily degenerate into blind egotism and naked self-interest, especially in an increasingly atomized and fractious sociopolitical order. Given these somber possibilities, as Taylor and other writers have noted, from the latter nineteenth century onward the modern self often experiences its situation to be that of a rootless loner and victim of overpowering social, economic, political, and psychological forces he can neither understand nor control. On the other hand, despite the erosion of a uniform, coherent order of belief, Taylor sees the break from a rigid, hierarchical, stratified moral and social order “under God” and the church as a necessary and generally beneficial “epistemic gain.” 30 As we shall see later, Girard and Percy draw a similar conclusion, though from different points of view. For Taylor, the break from the old order, at least potentially, inspired greater confidence in human reason, in mankind’s creative talents, in greater social responsibility, and in the development of humanistic values such as personal integrity, sympathy, benevolence toward others, a concern for individual justice, and the obligation to mitigate human suffering by care for the underprivileged and destitute in society. Girard particularly developed this latter theme in I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, as did Percy in his later novels.31 None of these advances, however, fundamentally changed the spiritual predicament and drift toward suicide dramatized by Dostoevsky and Percy, which Taylor cer29. See, for example, Taylor’s comments on language in ibid., 480. 30. Ibid., 313. 31. See especially Girard’s chapter on the modern concern for victims in his I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 161–69.

12 

Introduction

tainly acknowledged as well. But like them, Taylor also expressed a slim hope for a recovery and a reversal of this predicament. However, such a recovery, he argued, will not be possible without a return to a “theistic perspective” that includes “a non-anthropocentric exploration” of the sources of the modern self—that is, an exploration of the individual’s relationship to God.32 This is the hope that Taylor, like Dostoevsky and Percy, finds “implicit in Judeo-Christian theism (however terrible the record of its adherents in history), and in its central promise of divine affirmation of the human, more total than humans can ever attain unaided.” 33

6 The thought of these four writers—Kierkegaard, Girard, Peirce, and Taylor—form a framework for my study of suicide. Kierkegaard’s notion of the fully realized self “transparently under God” was adopted and adapted by Percy in his emphasis on the relational self and the process of triangular mediation as integral elements in the self’s search for a true identity. Likewise, the thought of both Kierkegaard and Percy is closely analogous to Girard’s anthropological and historical analysis of the mimetic patterns of human behavior. Dostoevsky’s novels and other writings, I believe, reveal a similar anthropological/religious understanding. Peirce’s semiotic theory of sign relations and community add a linguistic dimension to Girard’s and Taylor’s analyses, and Taylor’s sociological perspective anchors the development of the modern self in terms of a historical evolution. And most importantly, all four writers either explicitly or implicitly affirm that the only salvation for the self is, paradoxically, a self-sacrificing imitation of the singular model for the fully human/divine self, Christ himself. This is the broad sense in which I plan to develop the theme of suicide in Dostoevsky and Percy and to explore what I call “the age of suicide.” Kier­ kegaard’s definition of man as spirit and the self as a synthesis of eternal/ temporal being provides the basis for three central themes in Dostoevsky and Percy: (1) the dire predicament of the isolated, self-conscious self; (2) the search for a self and for existential meaning, as seen, for example, in Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, Alyosha and Dmitri Karamazov, Stavrogin, Kirilov, and Shatov, and Percy’s Binx Bolling, Kate Cutrer, Will Barrett, 32. Ibid., 506. 33. Ibid., 521.

 

Introduction 

13

Alison Huger, and Lance Lamar; and (3) both writers’ insistence on the spiritual sovereignty, moral integrity, and freedom of every individual.

6 My second purpose in this study is to show how in Dostoevsky’s and Percy’s mutual exploration of the relationship between ideological beliefs and their fiction, their principal characters’ actions can be understood through an analysis of literal and spiritual suicide (despair). Coextensive with this purpose, I plan to show how Percy absorbed Dostoevsky’s prophetic insights about modern culture and developed them further in his diagnosis of twentieth-century Western technological society. Although Dostoevsky anticipated many of these developments in his novels and stories, he could not, as Percy noted, have fully foreseen their almost unimaginable consequences in the twentieth century. For example, he could not have foreseen the degree to which the new ideologies of scientism and nihilism would come to absorb, dominate, and, along with technological development, deform the very consciousness of citizens in advanced technological societies. For Percy, this deformation has infected modern consciousness to the point that the notion of the self as spirit that can know itself “transparently under God” has become almost obliterated. Nor could Dostoevsky have foreseen the widespread erosion of traditionally accepted ontological understandings of meaning and the profound effect of these changes on language and our sense of community and shared values. Percy, of course, explored this predicament extensively in his novels and essays. There are, in addition, many direct echoes of Dostoevsky throughout Percy’s fiction that Percy adapted and updated in terms of mid-century American society—for example, as Percy acknowledged, in the parallel of scenes he created between the endings of The Brothers Karamazov and The Moviegoer and between the Grand Inquisitor chapter of The Brothers Karamazov and Lancelot.34 I will examine several of these echoes and adaptations, many of which are important because they relate to the broad theme of suicide, in my discussion of specific works. However, my study is not directly concerned with the influence of Dostoevsky on Percy as traditionally understood. Rather, my approach is intended to be analogical and progressive; that is, it attempts to 34. Desmond, “Fyodor Dostoevsky, Walker Percy and the Demoniac Self,” Southern Literary Journal (Spring 2012): 88–108.

14 

Introduction

show, with notable differences, continuities between their visions and the dynamic evolution of themes, motifs, and image patterns from Dostoevsky to Percy. Percy’s world is radically different from Dostoevsky’s in every way— culturally, religiously, philosophically, technologically, and psychically. But the two are also radically related in the fundamental sense of “radical”; that is, in the sense that they are both integrally related as prophetic visions of the modern and postmodern predicament. My approach, to use a concept from Percy’s semiotic, is to see the relation between the two writers as triadic—as an evolving triangular interaction between Dostoevsky, Percy, their writings, and the central spiritual, moral, and social issues that define and shape their responses to their respective ages.

6 There are, of course, important differences between Dostoevsky and Percy with respect to background, personality, temperament, and development. Dostoevsky, son of a physician, trained initially as an engineer but committed himself early to a career as a writer. The crucial event of his young manhood was his arrest and the frightening mock execution he underwent, followed by the four years he spent in a Siberian prison for alleged subversive political activities, an experience that gave him the material for his early success as a writer, notably with Poor Folk and The House of the Dead. After his release, he launched himself into the center of the major literary and philosophical controversies of the age, writing novels, short stories, and essays that confronted and dramatized the important political, moral, and social issues absorbing Russian intellectuals. Both his personal and public life were in constant turmoil—a lifelong battle against poverty, mounting debt, unscrupulous relatives and editors, personal tragedy (especially the deaths of his daughter and his first wife), and chronic sickness, the crippling and incurable epileptic seizures that would afflict him until his death. All these burdens, plus the burden of his creative genius, fueled his naturally volatile personality—his romantic emotionalism, his explosive temper, his jealousy and spitefulness, his various compulsions (gambling), and his xenophobia. But at the core of his character, despite persistent doubt, was a strong belief in the Orthodox Christian religion that gave him a sense of humility before God and human suffering, a firm belief in the spiritual dignity of each person, and in the eternal justice of God.

 

Introduction 

15

Walker Percy differed substantially from Dostoevsky in personality, background, social situation, and development. Born into a distinguished Southern patrician family, Percy’s early life was one of financial security and comfort. But in its history the Percy family was also marked by depression, melancholy, and suicide. As Bertram Wyatt-Brown has shown, between 1794 and 1929 at least one male member in each generation of the Percy family took his own life. One ancestor, Charles Percy, drowned himself by putting a kettle over his head and jumping in the river, an event narrator Tom More refers to in The Thanatos Syndrome. The novelist’s grandfather, John Walker Percy, committed suicide with a shotgun in 1917. Walker’s father, Leroy Pratt Percy, also committed suicide with a similar type of shotgun in 1929, when Walker was fourteen.35 The shattering death of his father was followed shortly afterward by the drowning of his mother, Mattie Sue, a suspected suicide. Walker and his two younger brothers, Leroy and Phinizy, were adopted and raised to manhood by their generous cousin “Uncle Will” Percy. Melancholy, occasional depression, and thoughts of his family history of suicide would haunt Percy as a man and a novelist throughout his life, as his writings clearly show. But serious consideration of suicide was ruled out after his conversion to Catholicism, as he told his friend Shelby Foote in a letter.36 Percy initially seemed destined for a career in science as a physician, though he had dabbled in writing from an early age. But after taking a medical degree, he contracted tuberculosis and was forced to undergo bed rest for an extended period at Trudeau Sanatorium in Saranac Lake, New York. The experience, one of psychological and physical exile somewhat like Dostoevsky’s exile in Siberia, was also transformative. Percy began reading extensively in philosophy, religion, and literature—St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Thomas Mann, and the modern European existentialists Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Marcel, Sartre, and Camus. Immersed in these thinkers, Percy began to question the scientific worldview into which he had by training been indoctrinated, re35. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, The House of Percy: Honor, Melancholy and Imagination in a Southern Family (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 13. 36. Tolson, The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy, ed. Jay Tolson (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 303.

16 

Introduction

alizing that the scientific view was totally incapable of explaining what it meant to be an individual person living in the modern world who is fated to die, an insight he gained primarily from his reading of Kierkegaard. After his release from the sanatorium, Percy eventually abandoned thoughts of a career in medicine and decided to become a writer, strongly influenced by what he saw as Dostoevsky’s, Sartre’s, and Camus’s genius for dramatizing ideas in fiction. Percy was especially impressed by the way Dostoevsky combined storytelling and cultural criticism in Notes from Underground and asked himself, “If D (Dostoevsky) were alive, whom would he attack?” 37 His decision to become a writer was strengthened by his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1947, which gave him a foundation of religious faith and vision that he came to see as more comprehensive, profound, and personal than the narrow scientific worldview he had once embraced. Like Dostoevsky, Percy maintained his special interest in science and its effects on contemporary life. More particularly, he focused much of his critical attention on the emergence of scientism, which he saw as a corruption of the genuine scientific method, as it became the dominant ideology or pseudo-religion of the twentieth century in the West. Scientism became the target of many of his most probing philosophical essays, novels, and critical statements. As well, he developed a life-long interest and competence in semiotics—the science of signs—which, along with the Catholic sacramental view of reality of his adopted faith, had a crucial impact on his worldview and his method of symbolizing in fiction. The external events of Percy’s adult life contrast sharply with Dostoevsky’s more desperate personal situation. Percy was financially comfortable, enjoying a stable family life as husband and father and growing success as a novelist and cultural critic. In temperament, Percy’s manner was stoic, reserved, and laconic—that of a wry loner-observer, though he was capable of flashes of anger and blunt sarcasm. Like Dostoevsky, he suffered periodic bouts of depression and melancholia. Unlike Dostoevsky, in his novels he mostly but not entirely steered clear of openly rancorous attacks on opposing thinkers, preferring instead to undermine what he perceived as their misguided ideas, both in his essays and novels, with devastating 37. Quoted in ibid., 183.

 

Introduction 

17

satire, meanwhile subtly insinuating his own Catholic counter-vision into the works. Dostoevsky, of course, was a brilliant satirist as well. Given Percy’s sardonic and often pessimistic disposition, there were times of serious challenge to his religious faith, of doubt and searching, but like Dostoevsky, he never abandoned his commitment to the Christian belief and, more particularly, to the sacramental view of life he accepted with his conversion to Catholicism. Although both writers shared a strong faith in fundamental Christianity and its view of reality, a crucial point of difference between them was Dostoevsky’s vehement condemnation of Roman Catholicism for what he felt was its corrupting acquisition of temporal power under Charlemagne in the year 800 a.d. Percy would obviously disagree, and their opposing views on this issue mark a key difference reflected in their fiction, as we shall see later. But what the two writers also deeply shared was a horror of what they perceived as the growing nihilism, rooted in the new ideologies, corrupting their respective societies, especially for Dostoevsky among the intellectual class in Russia, and then much more pervasively in Percy’s postmodern culture. To them, nihilism threatened the very substance of civilization and robbed every individual of freedom, spiritual meaning, and human dignity.

6 A logical question to ask at the outset of this study is: what did Percy have in mind when he said that Ivan Karamazov’s view of a godless society in which “all things are permitted” helped explain the “rise of all these ideologies”?38 Which ideologies was he referring to? The answer to the question is, of course, extraordinarily complex and can only be discerned by a close reading of both authors’ works. But in general, Percy was referring to all the secular ideologies spawned by the Enlightenment in the West and that have come to be named under a dizzyingly array of rubrics such as positivism, rationalism, materialism, naturalism, scientism, individualism, secular humanism, nihilism, social Darwinism, and the sinister ideologies of fascism, atheistic communism, and Nazism. In his seminal essay “The Man on the Train,” Percy referred to these ideologies collectively as “the objective-empirical disaster.” 39 What is important to see at this point, 38. Lawson and Kramer, More Conversations, 224. 39. Percy, “The Man on the Train,” in Message in the Bottle, 83–101.

18 

Introduction

as Dostoevsky did in his day, is that the rise of these ideologies must be understood in the light of the decline, and to most observers the collapse, of Christendom as the dominant religious and cultural force in the West. The situation in Russia and Dostoevsky’s reaction to it was somewhat different, partly because of his still strong belief in the religious faith of the Russian common people in Orthodox Christianity and partly because he did not live to see what Percy called “all the horrors” spawned by the new ideologies that emerged in the twentieth century, horrors Dostoevsky prophetically forecast in Demons. Coupled with what he regarded as the general decline of belief in Christianity in the West, Dostoevsky witnessed and opposed the challenges to traditional Orthodox belief leveled by many intellectuals in Russia. Implicit in this challenge, in both the West and East, was the decline or outright rejection of belief in the traditional religious-metaphysical view of the person as a limited being of free will created by God in his own image and owing allegiance to him as divine creator. As Taylor has shown, this traditional view was being eroded or displaced by the new ideological doctrines that claimed that all reality—including human nature—could be explained and, in theory, shaped by applying principles of reason and science to understand and master the essential laws of nature. The focus of the new ideologies was almost exclusively on man’s immanent existence in this world and the fulfillment of his earthly needs and desires. Consequently, traditionally held belief in metaphysical-spiritual reality and in man’s eternal destiny was either denied outright or considered irrelevant to ordinary, practical life. Rejecting the traditional view of the person as a limited being under God, the most radical expressions of the new ideologies affirmed belief in the “god-man,” or what Percy in Lost in the Cosmos called “autonomous man”—that is, the independent, self-conscious, selfwilled person understood as totally capable of shaping his own destiny. This is not to say, of course, that the new ideologies with their immanent view of the world and of man simply replaced the traditional view of man, God, and creation. The situation as it evolved from the Enlightenment is far more complicated and nuanced, as Taylor has convincingly demonstrated. Given that complexity, what we see in both writers’ principal characters is a profound spiritual struggle between traditional philosophical, religious, and moral principles—belief in God, the soul, immortality, conscience, free will, and personal responsibility—and the principles affirmed or implied

 

Introduction 

19

by the new ideologies—the radical autonomy of man defined solely as a creature governed by natural laws discoverable by reason and science. Inherent in this new ideology is the absolute right of the individual to pursue egoistic self-interest without reference to divine sanction or ultimate accountability to God. This latter view of man’s autonomy is the vital sense of Ivan Karamazov’s insight that in a godless universe “all things are permitted.” But as we shall see, both Dostoevsky and Percy believed that the goals and destiny of the autonomous “god-man,” and of society at large insofar as it subscribes to these ideologies, were fundamentally self-destructive and ultimately suicidal for the individual and for society at large. Percy suggested a fatal flaw in the consciousness of the autonomous self in his parable at the end of Lost in the Cosmos.

6 At the end of the episode titled “A Space Odyssey,” the captain of the starship Copernicus receives a message on the starship’s antennae. The message, which arrives after many years, is from an ETI, an extraterrestrial intelligence. The message reads in part as follows: “What is the character of your consciousness? Are you conscious? Do you have a self? Do you know who you are? Do you know what you are doing? Are you in trouble? How did you get in trouble? If you are in trouble, have you sought help? If you did, did help come? If it did, did you accept it? Are you out of trouble? Do you love? Do you know how to love? Do you hate? Do you read me? Come back. Repeat. Come back. Come back. Come back.” 40 Cryptic as the message is, with most of it in the form of unanswered questions, it summarizes not only the main theme of Cosmos but also the main concern of almost all of Percy’s writings: that is, the predicament of the self in twentieth-century advanced technological society. For Percy, that self is indeed in deep trouble, is “lost in the cosmos,” does not know for the most part who it is or what it is doing, or why. The predicament, which is actually age-old, is one that the self has largely gotten itself into or has allowed to happen to it, either consciously or unconsciously. Given that fact, it is possible to talk about a kind of suicide of the self, a self-inflicted psychological and moral wound from which it is very difficult to recover, even if 40. Percy, Lost in the Cosmos, 262.

20 

Introduction

recognized. Moreover, the symptoms of this deadly wound have accelerated exponentially in modern and postmodern society so that it is possible to speak of an age of suicide, beginning roughly in the mid-nineteenth century and extending to the present, though the roots of the predicament of the “lost” or suicidal self are found much earlier. To begin to understand this phenomenon, we do well to focus on the crucial questions asked by Percy’s ETI creature: “What is the character of your consciousness? Are you conscious? Do you have a self?” In asking us to think about the character of modern consciousness Percy is implicitly alluding to the primary distinction between the old consciousness or mind and the new consciousness, or what St. Paul calls the “old man” and the “new man,” one of the central themes of Christianity. It is impossible to understand the modern predicament without understanding this basic distinction. The distinction presupposes an original predicament—that is, that human beings are, as the saying goes, “fallen” creatures who are spiritually wounded or crippled by their disobedience to God their creator. Human beings are the first aliens—alienated from God, from their fellow aliens, and from their original, truest selves. Moreover, they are unable to overcome their predicament by their own efforts. They need help from some other source. In St. Paul’s view, under the old consciousness or old dispensation pagans tried to govern themselves by following some version of the natural moral law, with codes of justice, honor, nobility, and piety toward the gods. For their part, believers in the biblical tradition struggled to manage or overcome their predicament by following the Mosaic or Islamic laws and live lives of justice and righteousness as the law commanded, in the hope that Yahweh would reward them in this life. But as history shows, both pagans and believers failed repeatedly in this effort. The “old man” of pride and wickedness, of rivalry and violence, could not be put to rest under the dispensation of the Law, either man-made or biblical. Rivalries and violence persisted, and continue to persist, in cyclical fashion—that is, in a suicidal pattern of repetition leading only to death. In contrast, St. Paul preached the radical possibility of a new consciousness or mind and a “new man,” only made available by Christ’s incarnation, life, sacrificial death, and bodily resurrection from the dead. Christ’s

 

Introduction 

21

resurrection made possible the gift of the Holy Spirit—divine grace—a power that can transform human nature so that a “new self” can be born into a “new life,” a self informed or shaped by a love of God and one’s fellow man. St. Paul’s call to love God and fellow humans both fulfilled and transcended the limits of the old Law and old consciousness, but not without suffering and sacrifice, a humble way of life modeled on the life of Christ or, as Paul says, by “putting on the mind of Christ.” Perhaps even more radically, St. Paul preached that the potential “new man” would be superior to the original man before the fall, because Christ’s incarnation into human form made possible the transformation and final fulfillment of human nature—that is, of an integral self, a fully realized union of body and spirit. However, Christ’s coming did not immediately displace or overcome the old Law or old consciousness. Rather, it initiated the struggle between the old consciousness and the new that has persisted down through history. To repeat: this fundamental distinction between the “old mind” and the “new mind” is absolutely essential for understanding the root of the modern predicament—the suicidal predicament—in Dostoevsky’s and Percy’s writings. In short, this study is not only concerned with patterns of physical suicide in their works, but with the far broader pattern of spiritual suicide—the death of the integral, spiritual self manifested in their major fictions. Percy’s answer to the ETI’s questions “What is the character of your consciousness? Do you have a self? Do you love?” and to the nature of the modern predicament can also be found in Cosmos. In the section titled “A Semiotic Primer of the Self” Percy described the self’s “fall” into self-consciousness or what is called the “consciousness of consciousness,” a breakthrough into self-awareness with both positive and negative effects. On the one hand, it enables us to “stand outside” the world, as it were, and understand nature’s physical laws and manipulate them for our benefit, as well as to understand some of the dynamisms of human behavior. On the other hand, the very fact of self-consciousness, of separating ourselves from the world and from our experience to understand and manipulate them, is necessarily an abstracting and alienating experience, one that tends to separate us one from another as autonomous thinkers. It separates mind from the rest of reality and at the same time turns the mind inward toward preoccupation with its own processes. It leads to a schism in the self; we think

22 

Introduction

of the familiar mind/body dualism, the “ghost” (mind) in the “machine” (body). Such a self becomes “dis-integrated” in the root sense of the term, a fractured self or house divided against itself. In Cosmos Percy described, often with devastating humor, the various attempts of the dis-integrated self to ignore or attempt to overcome this predicament by its own efforts. Percy blamed René Descartes in the main for the modern iterations of the fractured, dis-integrated self. He pointed to Descartes’s identification of being (existence) with thinking—his dictum cogito ergo sum—as the main philosophical source of the modern alienated self. It implicitly supports the modern ideology of the autonomous, self-willed individual, as well as the gospel of individualism that after the Enlightenment became a central article of belief in the modern secular consciousness. What needs to be noted here, however, is that the predicament of the modern, dis-integrated self can be understood as a secularized variant of the old consciousness, with one fundamental difference. Nowadays, instead of striving to live up to the demands of the Mosaic or Islamic law to find salvation from its predicament or fallen state, the modern, fractured self seeks salvation through its own efforts of mind and will. Both attempts, ancient and modern, religious and secular, are alike in this respect, and both fail. Both are spiritually suicidal. As St. Paul would proclaim, the old consciousness is shaped by death, the spiritual death of the self—the kind of death witnessed historically in the cycle of fratricidal rivalry, violence, and despair. To further complicate matters, Percy argued that the mind of the modern autonomous, dis-integrated self has become largely absorbed by a distorted and reductive ideology extracted from science, an ideology that accepts the objectifying criteria of science as definitive of all reality. Nonmaterial or spiritual forces at work in the self are either excluded from consideration or reduced to essentially mechanistic criteria of understanding, such as Freud’s ego-id-superego model of the self. The modern self, as Percy argued, allows itself—its essence—to be defined by “them,” the so-called experts in the social sciences, which simply exacerbates the predicament of the already fragmented self. This is especially true when the self-conscious mind fully absorbs these criteria and then tries to define itself and act out life according to these criteria, like living in a room of distorting mirrors. The old consciousness, whether ancient or modern, is in fact based on a

 

Introduction 

23

false anthropology. As thinkers like St. Paul, anthropologist Rene Girard, semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce, theologian James Alison, and many others—including writers such as Dostoevsky and Percy—tell us, we are essentially communal beings, not autonomous, isolated individuals. Stated differently, we are by nature relational, imitative, and interdependent beings of limited free will. As such, we share a common predicament of woundedness or fallenness, as well as a common spiritual destiny. That spiritual destiny, at least for the aforementioned writers, is embodied in the formation of the new consciousness or “new man” that St. Paul described—a reintegration of the self only made possible through divine grace—with the ultimate goal of a full realization of our immortal human nature in the afterlife. What is required is a transformation of consciousness from the old life of egoism, rivalry, violence, and despair by an embracing of a new life of humility, suffering, reconciliation, and love, a life transformed by the Holy Spirit. The choice between the old self and the new self, between suicidal death on the one hand and spiritual life on the other, is the essential human choice.

24 

Introduction

Part 1

Fyodor Dostoevsky

F yod or D os toe vsk y D os toe vsk y and t he Road to Suicide

Chap ter 1 Dostoevsky and the Road to Suicide

Suicides are abundant in Dostoevsky’s fiction, in both his novels and short stories. Late in his career, in the 1870s, he became deeply alarmed by the phenomenon of widespread suicide in Russia, especially among young people, a phenomenon he called “the terrible question of our age.” 1 He set out to analyze the underlying causes of this crisis in two long entries in A Writer’s Diary for October and December, 1876. In those entries, he described the suicides of two young women. One was a girl who jumped to her death holding a religious icon in her arms. The second was the daughter of the well-known intellectual and émigré Alexander Herzen. These suicides also moved Dostoevsky to write two powerful responses to the events, “A Gentle Creature” and “The Sentence.” In the latter, he surmises that someone like the Herzen girl, raised in a household of philosophical materialism and atheism, came to see the “stupidity” of life and of human suffering and consequently took her life.2 When some readers of these Diary entries mistakenly thought that Dostoevsky seemed to be condoning suicide, he responded to these criticisms with a vigorous defense of his position. For Dostoevsky, the root cause of these suicides was not simply material, 1. Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary, trans. and annotated Kenneth Lantz, introductory study Gary Saul Morson (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993–94), 2:742. 2. Ibid., 1:751–75.

  27

social, or psychological deprivation. Rather, the cause was spiritual deprivation: lack of faith in God and in the immortality of the soul. In his view, a person who is unselfconscious may be content to “live like an animal,” that is, live an unreflective life without examining any of the deeply spiritual questions underlying human existence. But the self-conscious person who questions life’s very meaning but lacks faith in God and the immortal soul is eventually driven to the conclusion that suicide is the only honest response to the misery of existence.3 (Apropos this point, Percy believed that Kirilov’s suicide in Demons represented such an “honest” response.) Whether the person takes the fatal step, his thoughts and actions are absorbed by one central question: why continue to live and endure a lifetime of misery only to end in death? Dostoevsky then traced the line of argument the self-conscious thinker follows to arrive at the logical necessity of suicide. Denying the supernatural order and the soul’s immortality, such a person accepts the materialist view that immutable “laws of nature” determine all existence. Therefore, belief in man’s free will is simply an illusion, and since for him all human behavior is determined by the fixed laws of nature, no one is really to blame for what happens. Consequently, suffering cannot simply be explained or justified as being the result of personal choices. Neither can it be explained or justified by appeal to the notion of the “harmony of the whole”—that is, the belief that although some individuals suffer, it is necessary for the general good of humanity as a whole.4 Nor can suffering be explained or justified by the notion that reason and science will eventually produce a happy society purged of misery; such a view makes no sense to the self-conscious person suffering now. For him the laws of nature cannot be overcome. Suffering persists, and it is inexplicable—especially the mental and emotional agony the self-conscious thinker constantly endures. To this person, life is essentially absurd, and suicide appears as the only logical response to this predicament.5 Given his acute self-awareness, it is impossible for such a person to live like an animal, blithely ignore his predicament, and only concern himself 3. Ibid., 1:733–34. 4. Ibid., 1:733–34. 5. Ibid., 1:734.

28 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

with fulfilling earthly appetites for comfort and material gain. He knows that such a way of life undermines the human spirit, the unquenchable desire for life, and the fulfillment of the heart’s deepest longing. Ironically, in contrast to those who live unaware lives, the self-conscious person is deeply passionate about the fundamental questions of existence—who am I? Why am I here? Why do we suffer? Is there any larger meaning to life? He may well, Dostoevsky argues, become a lover of humanity in general, recognizing that everyone shares a common fate. Deep within, he knows that the rest of humanity is doomed to die just as he is. Therefore, life is absurd and its common fate is inescapable. However, because this grim knowledge conflicts with his emotional bond with others and his deeply felt sense of justice and injustice, he may become outraged on behalf of mankind. Consequently, Dostoevsky asserts, his general “love of humanity” will eventually turn into resentment and hatred of mankind, driven by his disgust at its common fate and at the general ignorance of those unwilling or unable to recognize their predicament.6 Since for him God is either nonexistent or cruelly indifferent to mankind, resentment or hatred of the divine being is futile and ridiculous. Consequently, he concludes that the only thoughtful response to life’s absurdity is suicide. Dostoevsky insists that such a line of argument cannot be refuted by rational argument. The only true answer to life’s mysteries, he affirms, is belief in God, faith in Jesus Christ, belief in the soul’s immortality and divine justice.

6 In parsing out the materialist argument in the Diary entries, Dostoevsky took dead aim at what he regarded as the broad religious and ethical implications of the suicide phenomenon, especially among the Russian youth he witnessed in the 1870s. When he called suicide the “terrible question of our age” he was pointing to what he saw as the inevitable consequences of the secular intellectual revolution and the emergence of new ideologies sweeping Russia and the West in the nineteenth century. In Russia, the sociopolitical outcome would be the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. He viewed these revolutionary movements—in politics, science, religion, and philosophy— against the backdrop of a waning religious faith in the Christian vision of life and belief in mankind’s eternal destiny, at least among intellectuals. 6. Ibid. 1:734.

 

Dostoevsky and the Road to Suicide 

29

But long before the 1870s, the traditional view of God, Christ, man, and the universe had already been challenged by new ideologies emerging from the Enlightenment in the West, ideas that had begun to infiltrate Russian culture since the time of Peter the Great (1682–1725). These new ideologies, as philosopher Charles Taylor his shown, emphasized the power of autonomous human reason alone to discover universal truth, to govern and direct human history and individual lives, and, aided by new discoveries in science, to imagine and create more perfect human societies. The optimistic interpretations of these Enlightenment ideas emphasized a dynamic vision of social progress toward the utopian goal of a happy society well-ordered by secular reason and science and directed toward the common good. As a young man in the 1840s Dostoevsky shared some of the idealistic, romantic spirit of the utopian revolutionaries. But after his years in prison he came to vigorously oppose those secular, rationalistic ideas, which he saw as a threat to both traditional Christian faith and genuine human freedom, especially after he visited the West and saw firsthand, particularly in England, the dehumanizing effects of so-called progress.7 The increase in suicides in the 1870s represented for Dostoevsky a growing sign of a possible worst-case result of abandoning traditional Christian principles in favor of emerging secular ideologies. Belief in mankind’s eternal destiny and the fundamental mystery of life would be replaced by exclusive focus on the material world as governed by universal laws of nature, laws considered partly or fully explainable by science. Belief in individual free will, in personal responsibility within the community, and in man’s essential spiritual nature would be replaced on the one hand by egoistic self-interest and on the other by increasing emphasis on the power of social environment, heredity, and economic forces to completely determine human nature and destiny. Dostoevsky’s dystopic vision of a future progressive social order governed by secular ideologies is of an ant-hill society populated by weak, sheepish humans who are slaves to natural appetites and to the will of an elite ruling class of social theorists, nihilists, and power-hungry materialists. Versions of this future “ant-hill” society, as we shall see, are depicted by the narrator of Notes from Underground and by the Grand Inquis7. Bruce K. Ward, Dostoevsky’s Critique of the West: The Quest for the Earthly Paradise (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfred Laurier, 1986), 76–78.

30 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

itor in The Brothers Karamazov. Percy will also symbolize the threat of such a possible “ant-hill” society in the image of Fedville, the government-funded technological center in Love in the Ruins and in The Thanatos Syndrome and in Lance Lamar’s proposed New Order of society in Lancelot. When Dostoevsky condemned the notion that reason and science alone could produce a happy society, he was not of course arguing in favor of irrationalism or a retrograde view of science and the natural world. Rather, he was condemning an exclusively secular rationalism because it promoted a reductive view of human beings, one that ignored man’s spiritual essence and human free will. Likewise, he was condemning what later came to be called “scientism,” that is, what Percy saw as the perversion of genuine science into an ideology that views individuals reductively as simply higher organisms in the natural order. Scientism began to exercise a pervasive influence on Western thought in the latter half of the nineteenth century and, in Percy’s view, an even more dominant and destructive influence in modern technological society after the turn of the century, as we shall see.

6 In the interview with Percy I quoted earlier, he said that “not even Dostoevsky imagined what man without God was capable of.” 8 His comment leads us to ask, what new developments in the twentieth century might he have had in mind that Dostoevsky, who died in 1881, could not have completely foreseen? Any analysis of Dostoevsky’s writings certainly shows that he foresaw many signs of the looming existential predicament of twentieth-century man, though probably not in its breadth and extremity. The trials of characters such as the underground man, of Raskolnikov, Nastasya Filippovna, Prince Myshkin, Ippolit, Stavrogin, Kirilov, and Dmitri and Ivan Karamazov clearly attest to his acute sense of this predicament. Many later manifestations of this predicament could be analyzed, but I will focus primarily on four prominent themes presented in their writings. The first is the degree to which the scientific method, extrapolated from science, evolved into what Percy called an “all-construing” ideology in the social sciences of psychology, sociology, linguistics, and anthropology; became, in short, scientism. As we shall see, the ideological arguments that 8. Lewis A. Lawson and Victor A. Kramer, eds., More Conversations with Walker Percy (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993), 203.

 

Dostoevsky and the Road to Suicide 

31

underpin scientism and its destructive effects on Russian society are represented throughout Dostoevsky’s writings. For his part, Percy considered scientism to be the most pervasive and influential ideology that emerged in modern technological society. Charles Taylor defined scientism as “the belief that the methods and procedures of natural science suffice to establish all the truths we need to believe. Scientism itself requires a leap of faith.” 9 Philosopher of history Eric Voegelin, an important influence on Percy’s thought, summarized three main dogmas of scientism: (1) the belief that mathematized science is the model science to which all others must conform; (2) the belief that all reality is understandable by the methods of science; and (3) the belief that all reality not accessible to science (i.e., the spiritual world) is either illusory or irrelevant. Scientism dismisses transcendent reality; it treats all reality as natural phenomena that can be understood through reason and quantified by science. Voegelin believed scientism to be the root cause of relativism, positivism, and “utilitarian rationality” underlying the sociopolitical movements of Fascism, Communism and Nazism.10 As I noted, under these new ideologies humans are held to be highly developed organisms, not spiritual beings with immortal souls destined for eternity. Scientism, Voegelin argued, became the idol of modern society, a dominant ethos presided over by so-called experts accepted as authority figures; Voegelin called them “spiritual eunuchs.” Calling the rise of scientism “the greatest power orgy in the history of mankind,” he said “that at the bottom of this orgy the historian will find a gigantic outburst of magic imagination after the breakdown of the intellectual and spiritual form of medieval civilization. The climax of this outburst is the magical dream of creating the superman, the man-made being that will succeed the sorry creature of God’s making.” 11 Percy always insisted on a clear distinction between science and sci9. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 404. 10. Eric Voegelin, “The Origins of Scientism,” in Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol.10, Published Essays 1940–1952, ed., introduction Ellis Santos (1948; repr. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 168–84. See also Lawson, “The Gnostic Vision in Lancelot, in Following Percy (Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1988), 196–210, and Cleanth Brooks, “Walker Percy and Modern Gnosticism,” in Southern Review, no. 13 (Autumn 1979): 677–87. 11. Ibid., 191.

32 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

entism. He meant “science in the root sense of the word, as the discovery and knowing of something which can be demonstrated and verified within a community.” Scientism, on the other hand, was a misapplication of the scientific method in which social scientists and other theorists claim to understand and explain human consciousness and behavior in exclusively positivist terms, a claim, as I noted, that Percy called “the objective-empirical disaster.” 12 To him, this “cast of mind, ‘scientism,’ misplaces reality” because it purports to explain human beings by abstracting from and reducing to so-called objective categories the real, concrete mystery of individual existence. The primary modern source of this “cast of mind,” according to Percy, is Cartesian dualism. Descartes, as is well-known, divided all reality into two categories: res cogitans (the mind) and res extensa (matter), a dualism that situates the mind outside the material order as isolated observer.13 Such an objective posture and cast of mind are of course necessary for scientific research and discovery. But when misapplied to human beings, scientism “creates vast mischief and confusion when we try to understand ourselves.” 14 Percy believed that this mentality had come to dominate not only the social sciences in the twentieth century, but more ominously, the very consciousnesses of ordinary citizens, the effect of which is alienation from true being—a “loss of the creature” and loss of personal “sovereignty.” For Percy, there is no such thing as an isolated, objective consciousness or mind. As the word’s etymology indicates (con-scio), consciousness always means “to know with”—that is, to commune with the actual or implied presence of an “other” (person, thing, idea) to whom or about which the thinking person is referring.15 The Cartesian notion of res cogitans versus res extensa (mind separated from matter) is a myth, but a myth that has powerfully absorbed and deformed modern consciousness and is responsible for much of the alienation, dislocation from true being, and despair that Percy saw in the twentieth century. He called this condition one of “ontological deprivation” and pointed to Descartes’s philosophy of cogito, ergo sum as the 12. Lawson and Kramer, More Conversations, 99. 13. Walker Percy, Signposts in the Strange Land, ed., introduction Patrick Samway, SJ (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 274. 14. Ibid., 279. 15. Ibid., 124–25.

 

Dostoevsky and the Road to Suicide 

33

cause of many of the psychological and spiritual troubles of the modern world.16 The second manifestation of the existential predicament revealed in Dostoevsky’s fiction and developed further in Percy is the “turning inward” of the modern mind, especially after Descartes, to intense preoccupation with its own state and activities, perhaps most famously dramatized in Notes from Underground. This intensifying of what has been called the “consciousness of consciousness,” an inevitable consequence of Cartesian dualism, was propelled further in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries by new discoveries in psychology (Freud, Jung, and others) and by the increasing popularization of the psychoanalytic approach to reality, also emerging in Dostoevsky’s day. But as Percy saw clearly, Freud’s theory of the operations of the human psyche is both materialistic and mechanistic, based on a crude model of energy exchanges between the id, ego, and superego. While valuable for revealing some of the nonrational sources of human behavior, the analytic model itself is rooted in the object-subject dualism of Descartes and is even powerless to explain the anthropological basis of its own theorizing. Using his own model, Freud could not adequately explain what he—that is, his self-conscious self—was doing in constructing his theory.17 At its best, this turning inward of consciousness, bolstered by psychoanalytic theory, might produce some valuable insights into individual behavior. At its worst, it could intensify isolation, solipsism, and a deepening alienation of the self from its own sense of rooted being and from its specific existential situation in the here and now. In addition, the threat of solipsism and alienation were further exacerbated by the general crisis in language, the increasing challenges to fact and value inspired by the combined forces of nominalism, linguistic relativism, and deconstruction, which together helped undermine trust in the ontological roots and stability of the meaning and significance of any sign and thereby weakened the bases of shared communication and understanding. This was particularly true for traditional religious language. As Percy often noted, terms like “grace,” “sacrament,” “redemption,” and “salvation” became emptied of meaning. As a novelist, Percy had to face 16. Ibid., 214. 17. Percy, Signposts, 277.

34 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

this crisis directly in the twentieth century in ways that Dostoevsky, for the most part, did not in his day, when an assumed consensus of meaning was still largely accepted despite the decline a shared religious belief. The destabilizing of language had a profound effect on Percy’s fictional strategy. He could no longer expect to reach a contemporary audience by writing lengthy or theoretical discussions of philosophical and religious issues, as Dostoevsky had often done in his novels. Instead, he was forced to employ an indirect and evocative narrative strategy, using satire and patterns of subtle images, symbols, allusions, and parallel and contrasting plot actions to convey his vision. In a broad sense, one can see the evolution of the theme of self-consciousness from Dostoevsky’s fiction to Percy’s presentation of the more widespread postmodern predicament of alienation. The narrator of Notes from Underground suffers from acute self-consciousness, mentally alienated from the world of normal action. In Demons nihilist-atheist Kirilov affirms the possibility of a “new man,” the person of autonomous mind and will who acts solely from self-will, a claim that intensifies solipsism and that would eventually lead him to madness and suicide. In opposition to this notion of the new man, in Crime and Punishment Dostoevsky affirms, through Porfiry, the possibility of Raskolnikov becoming a new man in Christ by committing himself to accept suffering, humility, submission to the will of God, and the love of others. In short, Raskolnikov must undergo conversion of mind, heart, and will. In The Brothers Karamazov, as we shall see, the monk Zosima further elaborates this Pauline notion of the emergent new man in Christ, exemplified by his conversion and life as a monk and, incipiently, by Dmitri Karamazov’s conversion at the end of the novel. Dmitri’s potential transformation is an important example of Dostoevsky’s religious hope. For his part, Percy constantly attacked the notion of the autonomous new man and the autonomous mind as a distortion or “derangement” of the postmodern mind, fostered by scientism. To him, belief in radical autonomy was a debased, nihilistic ideology that caused a deformation of the human mind. At the same time, like Dostoevsky he affirmed the possibility of a new spiritual man and new consciousness through the experience of suffering (ordeal), humility, and a commitment to love of others and to

 

Dostoevsky and the Road to Suicide 

35

the community. Each of his protagonists, except for Lance Lamar, undertakes this transforming journey in different ways. Unlike Dostoevsky, Percy as a novelist only indirectly links this process of spiritual regeneration to Christ, but there is no mistaking the Christian basis of his vision. As James Alison has shown, the process of conversion and emergence of a new consciousness is essentially made possible by belief in Christ’s resurrection, expressed in St. Paul’s belief that this world is “passing away” and that there is a “new world” (and new consciousness) beginning to be born since Christ’s resurrection, emerging in time and in history.18 This vision is the basis of hope in Percy’s writing and in Dostoevsky’s major fiction, despite the disasters and the threat of spiritual suicide both saw unfolding in their respective societies. The third manifestation of the modern existential predicament I want to explore, especially in Percy’s writings, is the extent to which sexuality became the primary locus of meaning for the modern and postmodern autonomous self in its relations with other human beings. Foreshadowing of this theme can be found in Dostoevsky’s writings. As has been noted by other critics, there is a powerful undercurrent of erotic conflict in the male-female relationships in all his major fiction.19 Dostoevsky was particularly obsessed with the theme of the sexual exploitation of women, especially young girls, children, and vulnerable women threatened or exploited as children. As a child Dostoevsky met a patient in a hospital where his father worked who had been brutally raped. The experience left an indelible mark on his imagination. Years later, he told a group of friends that he once considered writing a novel about an urbane gentleman who on a trip abroad rapes a ten-year-old girl. When his friends registered shock, Dostoevsky declared that he believed that “the most frightful, the most terrible sin—was to violate a child.” To take a life was terrible, he insisted, but to “take away faith in the beauty of love is the most terrible crime.” 20 Dostoevsky’s life-long obsession with the evil of the sexual molestation of 18. James Allison, The Joy of Being Wrong, foreword by Sebastian Moore (New York: Crossroad, 1998), 55–63. 19. For an especially good discussion of this theme, see Rowan Williams’s Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2008), 69–70, 178–80. 20. Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time, ed. Mary Petrusewicz (Princeton, N.J., and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), 449.

36 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

women is, of course, a central theme in each of his major novels and in several short stories. For his part, Percy saw sexual exploitation and sexual violence as a defining characteristic of the deformed, postmodern American male self and an inevitable consequence of the culture’s absorption of a Cartesian mindset. (Percy agreed with Tocqueville that most Americans are cultural Cartesians without being aware of it. In his essay “Diagnosing the Modern Malaise,” Percy argued that the modern obsession with sex, pornography, and explicit sexual behavior is “the consequence of an all-encompassing scientific-technological world-view”—that is, the worldview rooted in Cartesian dualism.21 He saw this obsession not so much as a sign of “moral decline” (i.e., an ethical issue), but more as a pathological sign of “ontological deprivation” (a metaphysical issue), of a “crippling of the very life of twentieth-century man” and an “impoverishment of human relations.” Because of the conscious or unconscious acceptance of a scientifictechnological view of the self, the modern alienated person comes to view “genital sexuality as ‘the real’; the basic form of human intercourse.” Percy believed that by a “reading or misreading of Freud, we, the lay man and woman, have come to believe that most forms of human relations and human achievement are surrogates of, sublimation of, and therefore at some time remove from, the ‘real’ relation and ‘real’ energy, which is genital and libidinal.” 22 But what happens, Percy asks, when the alienated, Cartesian self tries to discover or perform “the real” through sexual intercourse, and fails? “Two things happen, an impersonal sex life and a dispassionate violence.” Stated differently, Percy suggests that given the disordered state of modern consciousness and the self’s alienation from others, “only two real options remain, genital sex and violence, and perhaps the realest of all, death.” 23 As Percy laconically noted, when sex fails, there is always war or suicide. In the connection he established between the “ontologically deprived” modern self, sexual obsession, and violence, we can see how death (thanatos), especially suicidal death, either by an individual or the culture at large, be21. Percy, “Diagnosing the Modern Malaise,” in Signposts in the Strange Land, 214. 22. Ibid., 215. 23. Ibid.

 

Dostoevsky and the Road to Suicide 

37

comes for him a defining characteristic of twentieth-century technological society. Therefore, suicide in the broad sense I defined earlier is the fourth manifestation of the existential predicament I will focus on in my study— suicide understood in both the literal sense and as a sign of the more pervasive and generally unrecognized condition of despair in the culture. But as I said earlier, both Dostoevsky and Percy found some measure of hope for recovery, through faith in Christ, despite our predicament. These four themes—scientism, self-consciousness, sexuality, and suicide—will largely be the focus of my study. The four themes are so profoundly interrelated that it is impossible to separate them neatly as they interact dynamically within a single work, within the works of each individual author, and between Dostoevsky’s and Percy’s fiction. I shall focus on these themes as they emerge within the context of specific works. As we shall see, in his novels Dostoevsky anticipated the complex development of these themes, which Percy later dramatized in his treatment of major characters. As well, in each of his major characters Dostoevsky dramatized the clash between the new ideologies and the traditional religious, moral and, philosophical beliefs; or, as Joseph Frank expressed it, the clash between head and heart, between consciousness and conscience.24 Percy also dramatized this clash, but because he was convinced that the language of traditional beliefs was now largely emptied out and bankrupt, he was forced to use a more indirect, subversive method of presenting his vision and, like Dostoevsky, to use the weapon of satire to undermine the assumptions of the new ideologies and the disastrous consequences of following them.

6 Following Dostoevsky’s intuitions of the suicidal drift in Russia caused by waning religious faith and the rise of new ideologies, Percy explored the dire effects of these new ideologies in the twentieth century in the West, and particularly in America. Percy lived, as we all do, in what has been called the “postmodern” age, and in imagining what life is like in such an age he both looked back to and moved beyond Dostoevsky. For Percy, the postmodern age is an age of suicide, understood in the broadest sense as the widespread predicament of the “lost” self, the loss of individual sover24. Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time, ed. Mary Petrusewicz (Princeton, N.J., and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), 260.

38 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

eignty and freedom, and the drift toward spiritual annihilation. What is especially new in the postmodern age is the cultural dominance of technology and the way in which it mediates experience in such ways that our lives have become shaped by what Percy called the “objective-empirical disaster.” However, the suicide issue is also complicated ethically by the fact that some of the actual suicides (Kirilov and Stavrogin, Will Barrett’s father) are highly self-conscious men who kill themselves not simply out of personal despair, but partly as a passionate, indeed moral, protest at the dissolution of meaning and values they see occurring in their respective societies. Their fate is tragic, but not without meaning. At the same time, however, and to further complicate matters, in both authors’ novels we find that some characters’ thoughts of suicide have a tonic effect. Contemplating suicide leads these characters to a vital discovery, a love of life through the love of others, and the discovery of what can be called a “new consciousness.” Rather than being what Percy called “non-suicides” (unself-conscious lotus eaters) or actual suicides, they become “ex-suicides.” Such is the case with Raskolnikov, Dmitri Karamazov, Kate Cutrer, Tom More, and Will Barrett. These characters face the dead-end choice of suicide only to reject it in favor of life. At least in these cases, hope triumphs over despair.

 

Dostoevsky and the Road to Suicide 

39

Notes on Notes from Underground

Chap ter 2 Notes on Notes from Underground

Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground is a seminal work for understanding his and Percy’s diagnosis of the predicament of the modern self in a culture shaped by new secular ideologies. No other work by Dostoevsky dramatizes the self-conscious self’s struggles with the implications of the new ideologies as presciently and concisely as does the Notes. The novella helped shape themes and narrative strategies in all of Percy’s novels, especially Lancelot. He was very familiar with the novella, having read and studied it carefully during his recuperation from tuberculosis at Gaylord Farm Sanatorium.1 He also used it as a text when he taught literature and creative writing at Louisiana State University.2 What especially impressed him was Dostoevsky’s genius for dramatizing ideological themes and cultural criticism through the personality and actions of his alienated protagonist. The predicament of the underground man would have struck him as particularly apposite that of the postmodern self-conscious self, the subject of his own fiction later. As well, he would have been deeply impressed by Dostoevsky’s brilliant fusion of satire, parody, and tragic and comic pathos—all rendered through the mind and words of a complicated, 1. Jay Tolson, Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 183. 2. Patrick Samway, SJ, Walker Percy: A Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 264.

40 

contradictory, egocentric first-person narrator. Percy would adopt similar strategies later, though in less extreme form. In the Notes Dostoevsky was both dramatizing and parodying the self-conscious narrator as a representative type in nineteenth-century Russian culture, and Percy would develop similar cultural types in his fiction. The underground man’s divided self, torn by a struggle between what he calls his “hyper-consciousness,” his deep-seated, conflicted emotions, his will power and guilty conscience, and his self-awareness of this inner spiritual battle, anticipates similar struggles in Percy’s protagonists. In addition, the psychological and topographical habitat of Dostoevsky’s estranged anti-hero—the literal and symbolic underground he inhabits—is echoed later in Percy’s use of images of caves, cells, basements, movie theaters, covens, and other enclosed spaces as symbols of self-enclosed mental and psychological spaces in his novels.3 Many brilliant analyses of the Notes have already been developed by critics over the years. Of these analyses, I am especially indebted to Joseph Frank’s astute discussion of the novella.4 For my part, I plan to focus on those themes, motifs, and narrative techniques in the novella that directly anticipate Percy’s adaptation and further development of similar patterns in his fiction. Along the way, I enlist the aid of my four intellectual touchstones—Kierkegaard, Peirce, Girard, and Taylor—as their ideas help shed light on individual works. Percy’s debt to the Notes is finally incalculable, both in how it served as a fictional model and as a prophetic work that confirmed and helped him develop his own vision in the twentieth century.

6 When Notes from Underground was published in 1864, Dostoevsky complained bitterly about certain changes and excisions the censors had enforced on the novella. In an angry letter to his brother Mikhail, he said, “The censors are swine—those places where I mocked everything and sometimes blasphemed for appearance’s sake—they let pass; but where I deduced from all this the necessity of faith and Christ—they deleted it. What’s the matter with these censors of ours, are they in conspiracy against the 3. Rene Girard, Resurrection from the Underground, ed. and trans. James G. Williams (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012), chap. 2, 46–71. 4. Joseph Frank, “Notes from Underground,” in Notes from Underground, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, trans., ed. Michael R. Katz (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 202–37.

 

Notes on Notes from Underground 

41

government, or what?” 5 Since the original manuscript has not been found, it is impossible to determine exactly what the censors deleted. But as he told Mikhail, Dostoevsky considered “the necessity of faith and Christ” to be “the main idea,” presented in chapter 10, in his story. Since there are no direct references to Christ or the need for faith or, for that matter, to suicide in the published story, Dostoevsky obviously chose to depict the spiritual predicament of a protagonist lacking faith in Christ, a paradoxical strategy the censors clearly misunderstood. Yet the need for faith and Christ as the absolute measure of the narrator’s predicament is strongly implied in the novella, as we shall see. The underground man is a man in despair, and, as Kierkegaard explained, despair is spiritual suicide. More specifically, for Kierkegaard despair is the refusal to become a self “transparently under God” and is therefore a refusal of Christ.6 The underground man writes his story as an older man living in the 1860s. He has taken up his pen to try to explain how he became an embittered, fatalistic recluse who takes perverse pleasure in the inertia, hopelessness, and despair in which he now wallows. He claims that “the most intense pleasures occur in despair, especially when you are acutely aware of the hopelessness of your own predicament.” 7 His account is therefore retrospective and can be seen as a tortured search for the sources and meaning of his predicament. The theme of the search is, of course, central to Percy’s fiction, introduced in The Moviegoer in Binx Bolling’s search through his felt connection to “the Jews,” in Will Barrett’s search for an authoritative “father figure,” and in Lance Lamar’s search for the meaning of “sin” in Lancelot. Lance’s search is also retrospective, and like the underground man’s quest, it is also, paradoxically, both a genuine and a tortured search for meaning. Both searches end in failure due to their egotism and vanity. For Dostoevsky, and I would argue for Percy also, Christ is the ideal model for a fully integrated human self. All human beings, as Kierkegaard described, fall short of this ideal, and to that extent all are victims of 5. Michael R. Katz, trans., ed., Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 94; quoted from Fyodor. M. Dostoevsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridsati tomkh, trans. Michael R. Katz, vol. 28 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1985). 6. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death, trans., introduction Walter Lowrie (1941; repr. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955), 179, 182, 244. 7. Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, 7.

42 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

despair in some degree (232–37).8 But the searchers are acutely conscious of this predicament and continue to struggle against hopelessness and despair without succumbing to a fatalistic acceptance of their situation. The underground man, however, is resigned to his situation, so his search is a despairing attempt to examine the psychological and social factors that determined his life in order to justify his despair. Using the narrator’s confessional voice, Dostoevsky was able to critique the ideological forces shaping contemporary Russian intellectual society as well as undercut the narrator’s self-justifying arguments to show how both lead to despair. Throughout the story, the ideal of Christ and Christian ethics serves as the implicit standard against which to measure the general moral disease represented by the underground man. Percy later developed twentieth-century versions of the search in an equally paradoxical fashion. As many critics have demonstrated, the Notes is a scathing attack on the philosophy of rational egoism, the belief that reason and science alone define all reality, the gospel of scientism espoused in Nicholay Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is to Be Done? Dostoevsky condemned this ideology for its naively optimistic view of man.9 The underground man’s dual function as both victim and critic of this ideology establishes the central conflict between the rationalist ideology he absorbed as a young man and the inner spirit of egoistic desire, free will, and conscience that drives his rebellion against Chernyshevsky’s deterministic argument. As Aleksandr Skaftymov argued, Dostoevsky’s plan was to destroy his opponents “from within, carrying their logical presuppositions and possibilities to their consistent conclusion and arriving at a destructively helpless blind alley.” 10 Dostoevsky’s strategy was both parodic and paradoxical. It parodies the narrative tradition of the confession, partly in reaction against the optimistic romanticism of Rousseau’s Confession, while at the same time invoking the older tradition of the modern secular confession that, as Charles Taylor has shown, ironically had its origin in the Confessions of St. Augustine.11 This strategy creates a fundamental interpretative paradox: to what extent is the narrator’s 8. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 232–37. 9. Frank, “Notes from Underground,” 204. 10. Ibid., 205. 11. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 127–42.

Notes on Notes from Underground 

43

confession to be taken as an honest self-revelation, and to what extent is it to be taken as a self-posturing, disingenuous “performance” and attempt to justify himself? The same paradox will confront the reader later in, for example, Stavrogin’s confession in Demons and Lance Lamar’s in Lancelot. Apropos this paradox, it is well to remember that Kierkegaard’s criteria for an honest confession and reconciliation with God was an admission of personal sin, genuine repentance, and a call for divine help (grace) through Christ and the Holy Spirit. Anything less is despair.12 As I noted earlier, Dostoevsky also intended his protagonist to be both an individual and a type. In part 1 of the story, “Underground,” which contains the brunt of Dostoevsky’s attack on rational egoism, the narrator is introduced as a forty-year-old “representative of the current generation”— that is, the generation of the 1860s.13 He is a member of the Russian educated class schooled in the secular rationalist Enlightenment ideas inherited from the West. In part 2 of the story, “Apropos of Wet Snow,” the narrator recounts his disastrous life at age twenty-four—that is, during the 1840s, with its intellectual potpourri of idealism, utopianism, utilitarianism, rationalism, and sentimental romantic heroism. As Frank correctly observes, “The underground man is not just a moral-psychological type whose egoism Dostoevsky wishes to expose; he is also a social-ideological one whose psychology must be seen as intimately interconnected with the ideas he accepts and by which he tries to live.” 14 The same can be said of several of Percy’s protagonists. Binx Bolling, Tom More, Will Barrett, Sutter Vaught, and Lance Lamar are all representative types of mid-twentieth-century American culture insofar as they are also victims of the ideology of reason and science. In fact, American culture had become even more saturated with this ideology. Its citizens suffer from what Percy calls “ontological deprivation,” or what Girard called the “ontological disease.” 15 As the underground man says, “Being overly self-conscious is a disease, a genuine, full-fledged disease.” 16 Both the underground man and Percy’s protagonists rebel 12. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 214–31. 13. Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, 3. 14. Frank, “Notes from Underground,” 206. 15. Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and the Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 280. 16. Ibid., 5.

44 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

against this “disease” or deformation, seeking to understand and hopefully transcend it.

6 Part 1 of the Notes introduces the narrator as an alienated retired civil servant with a “divided” personality, of which he is acutely aware. “I am a sick man, I am a spiteful man,” he announces at once, only to declare moments later, contradictorily, that “the most disgusting thing” about his spiteful behavior is his constant awareness that “not only was I not a spiteful man, I was not even an embittered one, and that I was merely scaring sparrows to no effect and consoling myself for doing so.” 17 Spitefulness, he recognizes, is not the essence of his character; there are “a great many elements in me that are just opposite of that. I felt how they swarmed inside me, these contradictory elements.” 18 These contradictory elements include an egoistic desire to be recognized by others as a man of superior intelligence; a desire, inspired by books, to act as a romantic hero; resentment; promptings from a guilty conscience; sentimental self-pity; and most importantly, a deep longing for friendship and companionship. But since he “deliberately wouldn’t let them [his feelings] out,” he suffers shame, inertia, and psychological paralysis.19 “Not only couldn’t I become spiteful, I couldn’t become anything at all: neither spiteful nor good, neither a scoundrel or an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect.”20 His generous as well as malignant impulses are stifled. He retreats to his “corner,” a “nasty, squalid room” on the outskirts of town. Later, Percy further developed the theme of spitefulness, shame, deep resentment, and inertia in the case of his tormented narrator Lance Lamar, who, when rejected by his wife, Margot, retreats to the pigeonneur behind the mansion. And in The Thanatos Syndrome, Father Rinaldo Smith calls himself a spiteful man and retreats to a fire tower. In rationalizing his retreat and inertia the underground man claims that “an intelligent man in the nineteenth century must be, is morally obligated to be, principally a characterless creature; a man possessing character, a man of action, is fundamentally a limited creature. Only a fool can 17. Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, 3–4. 18. Ibid., 4. 19. The bracketed text is my addition. 20. Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, 4–5.

Notes on Notes from Underground 

45

become something.” 21 In the narrator’s dichotomy between “thinker” and “man of action” Dostoevsky pushed Cartesian dualism to its logical extreme. The underground man cannot “become something,” he rationalizes, because he is not an integral self; in him, mind is separated from action, and to act like others with “character” is “stupid.” He sees himself as riven between “hyper-consciousness,” vain fantasies, a confusing bundle of suppressed feelings and desires, and an impotent will. Being overly self-conscious, he argues, is a “genuine, full-fledged disease” that alienates him from the normal state of mind possessed by “spontaneous people and men of action.” 22 Trapped within this dichotomy, the narrator does not see that his “disease” is ontological and not merely social-psychological. His passivity and inertia are signs, in Kierkegaardian terms, of a proud refusal to become a human self “under God”; instead, he accepts his spiritual suicide. Both Dostoevsky and Percy pointed to the seductions of the ideology of “reason and science” as the cause of “hyper-consciousness.” The narrator claims that his acute self-consciousness emerged not from the “bosom of nature,” that is, Rousseau’s “natural man” (a belief Dostoevsky ridiculed), but from a “laboratory test tube,” a condition that paralyzes the “test tube man” in the face of his antithesis, the so-called natural man of action. The laboratory that produces self-consciousness is that of the scientist; specifically, of Descartes as scientist when he extrapolated mind from material reality and set it against the natural world. The result renders the self-conscious person not as an integral human being but as a specimen, a “mouse.” Such a mouse-like creature fell prey to “hesitations and doubts” and “anxieties” that eventually plunged him into “cold, malicious everlasting spitefulness” for forty years, constantly gnawing on the knowledge of its “shameful” condition. While the normal man of action can take revenge to redress an injustice, the self-conscious mouse-man rejects the “idea of justice” as ultimately meaningless under the deterministic laws of nature prescribed by the scientist. Consequently, the thinking “mouse-man” retreats from the world and lives “in that cold, abominable state of half-despair and half-belief, in the conscious burial of itself alive in the underground for forty years because of its pain, in that partly dubious hopelessness of its 21. Ibid., 4. 22. Ibid., 5–6.

46 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

own predicament.” His disease is spiritual, a constant tasting of that “venom of unfulfilled desire turned inward, that fever of vacillations, of resolutions adopted once and for all and followed a moment later by repentance— herein lies the strange enjoyment I was talking about earlier.” 23 The narrator’s despair reveals, paradoxically, both his passionate humanity and his fatalistic resignation to his predicament. While conscious of “what is good, of everything beautiful and sublime,” he refuses to aspire to any higher existence. Instead, he takes a “shameful, accursed sweetness and pleasure” in his humiliation, believing that he has “no other choice.” Dostoevsky parodied Chernyshevsky’s ideology in the narrator’s claim that even acute self-consciousness is totally determined by nature. “All this was taking place according to normal and fundamental laws of overly acute consciousness and of the inertia that results directly from those laws; consequently, not only couldn’t one change, one simply couldn’t do anything at all.” 24 He sees no possibility of a higher consciousness, of a “reason above reason” or openness to the divine mystery or of reality transformed by spirit. He accepts himself as trapped with the “hopelessness of (his) own predicament.” His fatalism whets both self-pity and guilt. “I’m always the innocent victim, so to speak, according to the laws of nature. Therefore, in the first place, I’m guilty inasmuch as I’m smarter than everyone else.” 25 Yet as Kierkegaard affirmed, the self-conscious man in despair is potentially the likeliest candidate for a reversal and acceptance of faith. From an ideological standpoint, the main thrust of Dostoevsky’s satiric attack is aimed at the anthropological assumptions of contemporary secular theories of “reason and science,” rational egoism, and natural evolution, which he found to be rooted in deterministic principles that were essentially anti-human. The narrator defines the “stone wall” that the “stupid” man of action battles against as the “laws of nature, the conclusions of natural science and mathematics.” 26 Specifically, he ridicules Darwinism and the selfish ethic that can be derived from it. “As soon as they prove to you that it’s from a monkey you’ve descended, there’s no reason to make faces; 23. Ibid., 8–9. 24. Ibid., 6–7. 25. Ibid., 7. 26. Ibid., 9.

Notes on Notes from Underground 

47

just accept it as it is.” Once the evolutionists “prove to you in truth one drop of your own fat is dearer to you than the lives of one hundred thousand of your fellow creatures,” this knowledge will “finally put an end to all the so-called virtues, obligations, and other such ravings and prejudices, just accept that too; there’s nothing more to do, since two times two is a fact of mathematics.” 27 Since all behavior is determined by laws of nature, no one is responsible or to blame for what happens. Behind Dostoevsky’s critique of determinism is his deeply held belief in free will and individual moral responsibility as the essence of human nature and the human spirit. Despite the seeming universal and absolute “laws of nature,” the underground man is still free to protest and name his predicament in writing, a sign of his human spirit. Dostoevsky demonstrates this indomitable human spirit by undercutting the narrator’s claim that he finds perverse “pleasure” in his predicament. His imagined interlocutor objects that “you’ll be finding enjoyment in a toothache next!” (Percy parodies the underground man’s situation in The Second Coming when Will Barrett is driven out of an underground cave by a toothache.)28 Though the narrator’s toothache is presumably the result of inflexible natural laws that are completely indifferent to his suffering, he nevertheless rages against the pain he feels, not as a “peasant,” but, ironically, as a man “affected by progress and Enlightenment civilization.” 29 He rebels against the laws of nature as a fully human person who moans “out of spite and malice” at his suffering. As Frank astutely observes, “Dostoevsky juxtaposes a total human reaction against a scientific rationale that dissolves all such moral-emotive feelings and hence the very possibility of human response. However, the narrator’s human protest at suffering is also a sign of spiritual health because “despite the convictions of his reason, he refuses to surrender his right to a conscience or an ability to feel outraged and insulted.” 30 Using the narrator’s dual identity as victim and critic, Dostoevsky pits the determinism of the “reason and science” ideology against the complex27. Ibid., 9–10. 28. Walker Percy, The Second Coming (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), 213. 29. Percy, Lost in the Cosmos (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), 83–126. 30. Frank, “Notes from Underground,” 212.

48 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

ities of human free will. The narrator scoffs at the notion that once man is enlightened and realizes what is in his best interest he will logically act for his own good. He insists that men often act contrary to self-interest. “A man may intentionally, consciously desire something even harmful to himself, something stupid, even very stupid, namely; in order to have the right to desire something even very stupid and not be bound by an obligation to desire only what’s smart.” 31 Indeed, as we discover in part 2, the narrator will demonstrate this truth by acting “stupidly” and suffering the consequences. Here, he argues that if a person only follows the commands of reason, he would immediately be transformed from a person into an organ stop or something of that sort. Desire and reason could then be calculated on a table and modulated to utilitarian ends. But he protests: “What sort of free choice would there be?” 32 To Dostoevsky, the rationalist ideology is flawed and contrary to experience. “Reason is a fine thing,” the narrator says, “but it’s only reason, and it satisfies only man’s rational faculty, whereas desire is a manifestation of all human life, which includes reason as well as life’s itches and scratches.” 33 The goal of the rational ideologists, at least theoretically, is to realize the utopian dream of universal well-being and happiness for all. Their aim is to eliminate suffering, though some may choose to suffer for the sake of higher principles. The rationalist optimists reject human suffering because it is said to create negative thoughts and doubt. Though the narrator claims that “suffering is the sole cause of consciousness,” he admits that men prefer to suffer because it is “infinitely higher” than the rationalists’ mathematics of “two plus two.” 34 Dostoevsky here introduces what became a major theme in his and Percy’s fiction—the relationship between suffering and consciousness. Opposing the rationalists’ belief that suffering is necessarily an evil to be eliminated at all costs, Dostoevsky argued that suffering can, if freely undertaken in humility and relation to God, transform consciousness and affirm the human spirit. It is not governed absolutely by the “laws of nature.” Rather, it is subject to individual choice, a spiritual choice that 31. Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, 4–5. 32. Ibid., 19. 33. Ibid., 20. 34. Ibid., 24.

Notes on Notes from Underground 

49

remains open to virtue, grace, and the possibility of a “new” consciousness that affirms a higher “reason beyond reason.” The deeper theological question this raises is: what is meant by “human nature,” or “what is a “human being?” For the determinist, it means that all reality is governed by immutable laws of nature. For the Christian believer, “nature” includes the “infinite” reality of spirit within human nature. The true dimension of “human nature” is only fully revealed in the person of Christ, the God-man. If consciousness were only a disease and the man of action only “stupid,” as the narrator claimed, he and everyone else would be trapped in a hopeless determinism. As we shall see, Dostoevsky dramatized this possibility of a freely chosen“new” consciousness in Raskolnikov at the end of Crime and Punishment, where suffering serves to burn away his murderous egoism and vanity. Dostoevsky’s emphasis on the value of suffering vis-à-vis the development of consciousness was important to Percy in several ways. The narrator’s view that self-consciousness is man’s “greatest misfortune” is echoed in Percy’s argument in Lost in the Cosmos that man’s acquiring self-consciousness constituted a “fall” in being, debilitating but not fatal.35 In addition, throughout his fiction he emphasized his self-conscious protagonists’ need to undergo some personal ordeal to overcome alienation and recover a true sense of identity and a more integral self. Ordeals such as natural disasters, personal tragedies, sickness and psychological disorders, war, and attempted suicide can, paradoxically, free a character from despair, moral paralysis, and inertia and help create a new consciousness and power to act, as it sometimes does in Dostoevsky’s novels. But there is no guarantee of this outcome. Suffering and ordeal can also intensify despair and lead to literal and/or spiritual suicide, a situation we see in both writers’ works. In the Notes, the visible symbol of the rationalist utopian dream is the Crystal Palace exhibition in London in 1850, which heralded the latest advances in science and technology. Dostoevsky visited the exhibition in 1862, two years before publication of the Notes. The underground man both fears and ridicules the Crystal Palace, as the author did, as the symbol of a future, soul-less, technocratic social order in which individual personal35. Percy, Lost in the Cosmos, 106–12.

50 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

ity is extinguished. “You (scientists and humanists) believe in the crystal palace, eternally indestructible, that is, one at which you cannot stick out your tongue furtively nor make a rude gesture.” Rather than being a sign of human progress, for the narrator (and Dostoevsky) the Crystal Palace represents the total dehumanization of mankind living in an “ant-hill” slave society and working like insects toward goals “that must always be none other than two times two makes four”—that is, “no longer life but the beginning of death.” 36 It is “death” because its main goal is to eliminate human suffering, which for Dostoevsky is a sign of individual moral autonomy, freedom to doubt, struggle, and choose to grow.37 To the narrator the Crystal Palace is nothing more than a “chicken coop,” suitable as a rain shelter, but only a building that embodies a strictly utilitarian view of man. As we shall see later, Percy developed two symbols of the “crystal palace” and its utilitarian ideology, one in the Century of Progress exhibition in The Moviegoer and the second in Fedville, the medical “humanitarian” center in Love in the Ruins and The Thanatos Syndrome. These are ominous signs of twentieth-century attempts to engineer happiness, love, and even “happy” death through euthanasia. The underground man rebels against the ideology represented by the Crystal Palace. But as Frank points out, his rebellion and retreat to the underworld are negative; rebellion alone is incapable of fulfilling his deepest desires and his fully human self. He yearns for something “better,” something “altogether different, something I long for, but that I’ll never be able to find.” 38 What he longs for and vaguely envisions is a truly human social order and society in which man’s deepest need for freedom, mutual love, companionship, justice, and truth might be fulfilled. What he longs for, as Dostoevsky intimated in his letter to Mikhail, is a society centered on faith in Christ.

6 In part 2 of the novella, “Apropos of Wet Snow,” the underground man recounts two crucial episodes from his life at age twenty-four that helped solidify his alienation from society. As we saw in part 1, his egoism and sense 36. Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, 23–24. 37. Ibid., 13. 38. Frank, “Notes from Underground,” 218–19.

Notes on Notes from Underground 

51

of superiority to others make him contemptuous of normal people and the “stupid men of action.” Despite his sense of alienation, he longs to be a man of action and recognized as a “hero.” His desire for relations with others stems from a deep need for human companionship, but the need is undermined by his egoistic desire to have his claimed superiority recognized by others, so that he can “defeat” those he regards as his inferiors. Caught in these contradictory needs, he feels self-loathing at his shabby appearance, at the fact that his claimed virtues and intelligence are not recognized, at the gnawing fear that he is governed by immutable “laws of nature” just like everyone else, and that he is in fact “a coward and a slave.” But he resists such a loathsome self-image out of vanity. Instead, he examines the earlier sources of his current predicament. He admits that in his youthful rebellion in his twenties he subscribed to a romanticism that was “all affected, borrowed from books.” (We recall in this regard Binx Bolling’s early addiction to “scientific” books, and his continuing infatuation with movie heroes and beautiful women.) The narrator insists that rather than emulate the “transcendent” European romantics “wrapped up in cotton for the sake of the ‘beautiful and the sublime,’ ” he followed the Russian model of the down-to-earth romantic hero-scoundrel. He first tried to establish social friendships, which all ended in quarrels because of his overweening arrogance. Then he “plunged into depravity” and began to frequent brothels, behavior that only intensified his self-loathing and sense of shame. Role-playing and self-delusion drove him deeper into alienation and psychological confusion. Nevertheless, his guilt and self-revulsion was, and is, a sign of his conscience and his deep longing for some moral balance.39 Two pivotal events in his life at age twenty-four confirm the narrator’s retreat to the “underground”: his behavior at a farewell party for a former schoolmate, Zverkov, and his encounter with a young prostitute, Lisa. At the party, he proceeds to get drunk and insult all of his former classmates after they have repeatedly scorned and humiliated him for his boorish behavior. Furious at their treatment of him, he first challenges one of the guests, Firfichkin, to a duel and later plans to challenge Zverkov, but his former schoolmates simply collapse in laughter at his preposterous challenge. Dos39. Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, 32, 33.

52 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

toevsky’s parody of the tradition of the duel is highly significant here and elsewhere in his fiction—for example, in the cases of the elder Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov and Stavrogin in Demons, as we shall see. The tradition of the duel as a test of personal honor and courage is, of course, long-standing in European and Russian culture, even though legally forbidden in Russia except among military officers. Percy will also evoke this tradition in The Last Gentleman and in Lancelot. But in this case the underground man’s challenge is presented as ridiculous, suggesting that the “honorable” code of the duel is rendered meaningless in a culture shaped by the new ideology. If all actions are governed by “laws of nature,” traditional concepts of honor, nobility, courage, justice, and revenge become meaningless. The underground man may feel insulted and desire satisfaction, but under the circumstances his challenge appears absurd. He is trapped in a decadent mode of conduct, and to the extent that he is, Dostoevsky satirizes the vanity and stupidity of the romantic code symbolized by the duel. The code of the duel of honor, of course, was an important part of the Southern stoic moral code of noblesse oblige in the old South. In Lancelot, Percy will also underscore the decadent morality of this code by emphasizing its viciousness and brutality, first in Lance’s tale of his ancestor’s savage duel and then in Lance’s brutal murder of Jacoby. The second crucial episode of the narrator’s youth was his encounter with the young prostitute Lisa after his humiliation at Zverkov’s farewell party. Before discussing this episode, it is important to note its larger philosophical significance, both for Dostoevsky and, later, for Percy. The underground man’s turn to sexual intercourse with the prostitute to escape his isolation is an exercise in what Percy later called attempted “re-entry” from the “orbiting” of the isolated self-conscious self who suffers from Cartesian dualism.40 Like Percy’s alienated, self-conscious self in Cosmos, the underground man attempts reentry into the ordinary world to assert a real self, or, in Dostoevsky’s terms, he tries to act sexually as a normal “man of action.” In Cosmos, Percy argues that sexual conquest and violence became the two twentieth-century modes by which an alienated self who suffered from “ontological deprivation” would attempt to “prove” the self is “real.” 40. Percy, Lost in the Cosmos, 141–59.

Notes on Notes from Underground 

53

The failure of such attempts at “reentry,” combining violence and seduction or rape, often leads to literal or spiritual suicide in both authors’ works. In addition to the theme of attempted reentry through sexual conquest, Dostoevsky also parodies the romantic social humanitarianism of the period, which he also regarded as an inheritance from Western liberal thought.41 Here, parody takes the form of a reversal of what by the nineteenth century had become a literary cliché; that is, the romantic theme of the redemption of the prostitute. Just as in the party episode, the underground man’s attempt to assert himself as a “man of action” is defeated by his insatiable vanity, which in this episode turns brutally sadistic. In the prostitute Lisa, Dostoevsky presents an image of that genuine self-sacrificing compassion and love that alone offers any hope for the narrator’s escape from isolation. But blinded by egoism, the narrator is unable to accept Lisa’s compassionate gesture. Once again, his latent capacity for authentic emotional and moral action is undermined by his exaggerated sense of superiority and his emotional greed. Still enraged by his humiliation at the party, the narrator follows the other guests to a brothel where he engages the services of the young prostitute, Lisa. But once he has mastered her physically, he intuits the girl’s resentment of him in her silence and detachment. His pride wounded, he then decides to master her spiritually by coaxing her with feigned sympathy into revealing the dismal truth of her unhappy life as a prostitute. But ironically, he gets emotionally caught up in his ego-gratifying role as sympathetic counselor and putative savior, offers to help her reform, and invites her to his apartment. Dostoevsky reveals a sadistic underside of sentimental romanticism in the narrator’s cruelty and desire for revenge. After leaving the brothel, however, the narrator realizes that Lisa’s visit to his shabby apartment will be another humiliation added to the disgrace he suffered at the party. Once home, his pride suffers under the recalcitrance of his stubborn servant, Apollon, so much so that when Lisa arrives, he bursts into tears and cries that he is being “tortured” by his servant. But his emotional breakdown in front of her, partly staged, only whets his appetite for revenge. When Lisa announces her plan to quit the broth41. Frank, “Notes from Underground,” 222–24.

54 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

el and tries to console him for his troubles with Apollon, his masochism and self-pity turn into sadism. He reveals that his earlier sympathy for her plight and offer to help her was all a sham. “I vented my spleen on you and laughed at you. I had been humiliated, so I wanted to humiliate; I had been treated like a rag, so I wanted to show my power. And I shall never forgive you for the tears I could not help shedding before you just now, like some silly woman put to shame! And for what I am confessing to you now, I shall never forgive you, either!” 42 But in a brilliantly ironic reversal, Lisa sees that his misery and emotional needs are greater than hers. She embraces him and tries to console him, recognizing his affliction and need for compassion. But her gesture of self-giving love is too much for the vain egoist to accept. “In my overwrought brain the thought also occurred that our parts were after all completely reversed now, and that she was now the heroine.” 43 Full of brutal hatred, he again coldly seduces her, then hands her a five-ruble note for her sexual services. Worse yet, he rationalizes his sadism by attempting to convince himself that the humiliation and suffering he has inflicted on the girl will help purify and elevate her consciousness.44 As Percy also does in his novels, Dostoevsky here parodies his own strong convictions in the words and actions of his narrator. In Lancelot, Lance Lamar argues that Anna’s having suffered gang-rape has transformed her consciousness and purified her into the New Woman–Eve of his proposed future social order. But Lisa rejects the narrator’s attempt to pay her and leaves the underground man to his fate as the embittered, isolated egoist that he becomes. Nevertheless, as Frank points out, it is well to remember that his rebellion against an increasingly dehumanizing culture, though marked by romantic fantasy, egoistic masochism, and defeat, does reveal a human anguish that instinctively rejects the deterministic view of man ruled completely by laws of nature.45 But for Dostoevsky, in a society increasingly turning away from Christ, such a negative rebellion offers no viable solution to the moral and psychological predicament the narrator faces. 42. Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, 83–84. 43. Ibid., 85. 44. Ibid., 87. 45. Frank, “Notes from Underground,” 233–34.

Notes on Notes from Underground 

55

While there is no explicit act of suicide in the Notes, the novella nevertheless depicts a case of spiritually suicidal alienation and despair personified in the hyper-consciousness, egoism, and incapacity to love shown in the underground man. Furthermore, in his attack on determinism and the dehumanizing threat of the new ideologies, Dostoevsky issued a warning to his culture of the suicidal path of spiritual and social chaos it was in danger of following without faith in Christ. As Frank points out, Dostoevsky’s insight into the spreading egoistic individualism in society was prophetic of the dangerous nationalism and fratricidal war that would engulf twentieth-century Europe and Russia.46 At the same time, he suggested an alternative to this drift toward self-destruction, not in the negative rebellion of the underground man, but in the positive “rebellion” against these forces, shown in Lisa’s assertion of her freedom and dignity and by her offer of genuine, self-sacrificing love to another. Such an action embodied the Christian value of caritas that Dostoevsky optimistically believed to be the soul of the ordinary Russian people and the only real solution to the age’s growing spiritual disease of hyper-consciousness, rationalism, materialism, and moral paralysis. 46. Ibid., 226.

56 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Crime and Punishment: A Modern Case

Chap ter 3 Crime and Punishment A Modern Case

Just before he directly accuses Raskolnikov of the murder of pawnbroker Aloyna Ivanova and her sister Lizaveta, the investigating examiner Porfiry describes the case succinctly. “We’re dealing with quite a fantastic affair here, a somber affair, a modern one, a case characteristic of our time, when men’s hearts have grown rank and foul, when you hear phrases quoted that blood ‘revives,’ when comfort is held up as the only worthwhile thing in life. We’re dealing with bookish dreams here, with a heart exacerbated by theories.” Raskolnikov, he concludes, “murdered two people for the sake of a theory.” 1 In Porfiry’s view, Raskolnikov is a representative figure of the age, a young man whose murderous act was partly motivated by an ideology that permits killing on the basis of social and anthropological theories. What drives him to murder is not greed or malice but a warped idealism, a theory of reality that rebels against the normal order of life as he experiences it. In this sense his revolt is metaphysical, an intellectual gambit to validate his theory and prove himself a worthy exemplar of its values. Metaphysical revolt will also be an important theme in Percy’s novels. In a comment about his first published novel, The Moviegoer, Percy described 1. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans., with introduction, by David Magarshack (New York: Penguin, 1951), 467.

57

protagonist Binx Bolling as a young man engaged in a “metaphysical” rebellion against the “shallowness and tastelessness of modern life.” He then compared Binx as a rebel to Dostoevsky’s protagonist Rodion Raskolnikov.2 At first glance the comparison seems odd, given that Binx is a successful young bond salesman living a comfortable life in Gentilly, a suburb of New Orleans, whereas Raskolnikov is a desperately poor and deeply tormented ex-student living in mid-nineteenth-century Petersburg. But despite their radically different social milieu and personal circumstances, the comparison is apt. Both are in revolt against the order of the world as they find it, and both embark on a search for meaning—that is, a metaphysical quest to discover their true identity and the purpose of their existence in relation to the world. Both face significant personal obstacles to their search for meaning: their romantic “heroic” idealism, fed by books (Raskolnikov) and movies (Binx), their vanity and capacity for self-deception. Compounding these personal challenges is the fact that they inhabit a society in which belief in the metaphysical-spiritual order of reality and the moral values it ordains is in danger of disappearing or being reduced to exclusively utilitarian standards. Both Raskolnikov and Binx are what Porfiry rightly calls “a modern case.” But as we shall see, Dostoevsky’s novel anticipated themes and motifs in several Percy novels, and not just in The Moviegoer. For example, Raskolnikov’s search for identity anticipates Will Barrett’s similar search for meaning in The Last Gentleman and The Second Coming, and in a different sense, the search of murderer Lance Lamar in Lancelot. Dostoevsky’s subtle analysis of Raskolnikov’s “fractured” self—a person torn between conscience and an ideology based on theory, between self-doubt, religious faith, and reason—anticipated the predicaments of Lance Lamar and Dr. Tom More in Love in the Ruins. As well, Dostoevsky’s development of the broader social and philosophical conflict between traditional Christian faith and its moral values and the new rationalist-utilitarian philosophy foreshadowed Percy’s development of a similar conflict in his novels, especially Love in the Ruins and The Thanatos Syndrome. In addition, Dostoevsky’s penetrating analysis of the relationship between the new ideology, sexuality, and suicide, shown in the case of the predator Svidrigalov, anticipat2. Lewis A. Lawson and Victor A. Kramer, eds., Conversations with Walker Percy (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985), 3.

58 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

ed Percy’s analysis of a similar theme in several novels and in Lost in the Cosmos. As he had done in Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky linked Raskolnikov’s intellectual and moral conflicts and the murders of the pawnbroker Alyona and her sister Lisaveta to the larger ideological and social forces at work in the culture. Raskolnikov had already imbibed the rationalist-utilitarian ideology before he committed the botched murders. He had earlier written an essay theorizing the right of the superior individual to kill others to promote the humanitarian goal of “the welfare of all humanity.” In his essay, he argued that such murders can be justified on the basis of relative, utilitarian goals alone.3 Shortly before the murders, Raskolnikov listens to a student defend the utilitarian view by appealing to a “great man” theory of personality—that is, the right of the superior person to “step over the line” of traditional moral principles to achieve pragmatic goals. Under this theory, the “great man,” as exemplified by Napoleon, possesses exceptional intelligence and will power, gifts granted by the “law of nature,” according to which some are born weak and some strong. His fate and destiny command him to “advance civilization” in defiance of heretofore accepted traditional moral constraints. Hearing the student’s argument, Raskolnikov realizes that “exactly the same ideas were just beginning to stir in his own mind.” 4 Psychologically, the subsequent double murders are in great part Raskolnikov’s attempt to test the theory and discover if he is such a “superior” individual. Prideful egoism and grinding poverty lead him to the deed, but after his carefully thought-out plan goes awry, anxiety and guilt plunge him into a wrenching self-examination of his failure; he is tormented anew by doubts over whether he is “a man or a louse.” 5 The “great man” theory of history is not described explicitly as a primary characteristic in Percy’s postmodern culture, but the utilitarian argument in favor of the right to kill others deemed worthless, which is Raskolnikov’s view of the pawnbroker, to advance civilization becomes a major political and social theme in Love in the Ruins and The Thanatos Syndrome. However, the difference in Percy’s utilitarian characters in those two nov3. Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, 275–80. 4. Ibid., 85. 5. Ibid., 431.

Crime and Punishment: A Modern Case 

59

els, that is, the Fedville doctors who practice euthanasia, is that they have become so indoctrinated in the reason-and-science ideology that matters of conscience based on belief in a metaphysical-spiritual order of reality have been virtually erased from their minds. What Dostoevsky presents as a conscious revolt by Raskolnikov against traditional moral principles degenerates into a more widely accepted crossing the line in Percy’s postmodern society. Percy saw the intellectual groundwork for this erosion of moral principles dramatized in Raskolnikov’s theoretical justification for killing in Crime and Punishment. Dostoevsky undercuts Raskolnikov’s pretense of being a great man and its ideological assumptions in several ways. After the double murder, he falls into a fever and sickness and relives the gruesome murders in nightmarish dreams. But his initial anguish and shame do not stem from a belief that he has violated any universal moral law. Rather, he is distraught because his “rational” plan failed miserably; his “stepping over the line” neither proved his superiority nor advanced mankind in any way. Though destitute, he even abandoned the valuables he has stolen from the pawnbroker. His search to discover his “true” self through violence as a “man of action,” like that of the underground man earlier and Lance Lamar later, only intensifies his inner torment and confusion. He considers suicide, the ultimate “stepping over the line,” but knows that he lacks the strength of will to carry it out. At the same time, like all Dostoevsky major protagonists, Raskolnikov is a man of contradictions. His nagging guilt and self-castigation reveal him also to be a man of conscience who empathizes with others’ suffering. Though desperately poor, he tries to save a drunken girl from seduction, offering to pay for a cab so that she can escape the predatory Svidrigalov. He grieves over a drowned young prostitute, a suicide, and over the dismal fate of all prostitutes. He gives the impoverished Marmeladov family money after the drunken Mr. Marmeladov is run over in the street and dies.6 Such contradictory actions show what Joseph Frank has called a “radical split” between “head” and “heart” in his personality. Dostoevsky links Raskolnikov’s personal conflicts to the broader ideo6. Ibid., 66, 72.

60 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

logical and social conflicts of the age primarily through his relationships with other important characters in the novel to create a pattern of contrasting perspectives. Since both he and Percy were satirists, often their strategy of attack was to trace the implications of the new ideologies to their logical extreme ends, as we saw in the Notes. In this pattern of contrasts, secondary characters both mirror and expand the main argument, as Frank has shown.7 For example, Raskolnikov’s only close friend, the level-headed Rozumikhin, plays such a role. He ridicules a local bookseller who has “gone in for progressive movements” and who promotes a “German text” that discusses the question of “whether a woman is a human being or not.” 8 Rozumikhin condemns those social theorists who, under the utilitarian ideology, insist that “the absolute renunciation of one’s own personality” is “the highest achievement of progress,” an obvious parody of the Christian ideal.9 Such a view negates free will and individual responsibility. Later, when discussing the causes of crime with the investigator Porfiry, Rozumikhin attacks the determinism of the “socialists” and theorists who claim that “crime is a protest against bad and abnormal social conditions and nothing more. No other causes are admitted.” 10 He points out, sarcastically, that “they reduce everything to one common cause: environment. Environment is the root of all evil—and nothing else. And the direct consequence is that if society is organized on normal lines, all crimes will vanish forever, for there is nothing to protest, and all men will become righteous in the twinkling of an eye. Human nature isn’t taken into account at all.” 11 In The Thanatos Syndrome, antagonists Drs. Comeau and Van Dorn will make a similar argument about the elimination of crime by extolling the use of drugs as a means to “correct” aberrant social behavior. For his part, Raskolnikov at one point rationalizes his murders by thinking that his poverty justifies his killings, as well as by trying to claim that he did not commit a crime at all because he had convinced himself that the superior man is above such traditional moral conventions. 7. Joseph Frank, Fyodor Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time, ed. Mary Petrusewicz (Princeton, N.J., and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), 494–95, 499–500, 504–6. 8. Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, 130. 9. Ibid., 219. 10. Ibid., 219. 11. Ibid., 272–73.

 

Crime and Punishment: A Modern Case 

61

In addition to Rozumikhin’s attack on the social ideologists, Dostoevsky underscores the selfishness and amorality at the heart of the progressive ideology and its social vision through the businessman Luzhin, Dunya Raskolnikov’s chauvinistic suitor. Luzhin argues in favor of “a practical attitude to life,” that is, the progress of civilization through science and economic self-interest, based strictly on utilitarian values. “Science tells us,” he claims, “love yourself before everyone else, for everything in the world is based on self-interest. By acquiring wealth exclusively and only for myself, I’m by that very fact acquiring it, as it were, for everybody and helping to bring about a state of affairs in which my neighbor will get something better than a torn coat, and not through the private charity of a few, but as a result of a higher standard of living for all.” 12 Appalled by this argument, Raskolnikov vehemently rejects Luzhin’s philosophy and banishes him as Dunya’s suitor. But as Dostoevsky subtly implies, Luzhin’s amoral “practical attitude to life” is an economic version of Raskolnikov’s idea of achieving the “betterment” of society through the murderous actions of a “superior” man. Both try to justify the ruthless autonomy of the individual. By linking Raskolnikov and Luzhin in this way Dostoevsky broadens the range of the central ideological debate between the progressive, utilitarian vision and traditional Christian values, as Percy would also do in his novels and essays. This central debate is the focal point of Raskolnikov’s personal search to understand himself and the answer the questions, Who am I? What is the meaning of my life? His attempts to justify his actions by appeal to the progressive ideology, driven by his pride and resentment of his impoverished state, conflict with his intuitive sense of conscience and empathy with the sufferings of others. Sonya Marmeladov, the reluctant prostitute who sacrifices her virtue to support her family, personifies the voice of his conscience. As Luzhin represents ruthless self-interest and perverse social consequences of the utilitarian view, the compassionate Sonya Marmeladov represents the ethical and religious vision opposed to the progressive ideology. Raskolnikov struggles, psychologically and morally, between these opposing visions. Percy’s Lance Lamar, more cynical than Raskolnikov, will engage in a similar struggle, but without the benefit of another explicit voice like that 12. Ibid., 166–67.

62 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

of Sonya to contend with in his struggle. The mystery of Sonya’s deep faith in God amidst her miserable, self-sacrificing life is a contradiction that confounds Raskolnikov’s rational egoism. Unable to understand her goodness, humility, and charity, he is nevertheless drawn to her as a spiritual center of gravity that appeals to his deepest moral impulses. Initially, she remains an enigma to Raskolnikov. Since he denies God but respects her suffering, he tries to argue that her only “sin” was “ruining herself for nothing.” 13 He sees only three alternatives for her: suicide, madness, or total debasement as a prostitute.14 To him, her suffering is meaningless. He then tries to rationalize her life by convincing her that she is a fellow “rebel” like him, a victim “damned” by poverty. “You, too, stepped over—you’ve laid hands on yourself—destroyed a life—your own life,” he argues, as if their actions were morally equivalent. “You won’t be able to bear it, and if you remain alone you will go mad like me.” 15 He insists that she, like him, had to “break what must be broken” in the “name of freedom and power over all the tumbling vermin and over the ant-hill” of humankind.16 Here, in effect, he argues for a “great woman” or “new woman” theory of action. The crucial point he misses is that Sonya suffers out of love for others, a charitable action that is the opposite of his ego-driven suffering for himself, although he does vaguely hope to relieve his mother’s and sister’s poverty. But with her strong faith in God, Sonya rejects such reductive thinking. Her life is centered on a loving, forgiving God who looks mercifully on her “sin” and on a Christ who is the source and model for her compassionate commitment to others. She believes that in God’s eyes all people are sinners and deserve mercy; God, she insists, “does everything” for her. Learning of Raskolnikov’s murders, she urges him to confess, humble himself before God and the world, and accept his just punishment. She reads him the story of Lazarus, believing that resurrection from the dead is possible for him as well. Yet Raskolnikov resists, still claiming that his only guilt is for having failed in his plan, though he does admit to Sonya that, in truth, he acted only for himself to find out whether he was a “louse” or a “man,” that is, a 13. Ibid., 337. 14. Ibid., 338. 15. Ibid., 344. 16. Ibid., 345.

Crime and Punishment: A Modern Case 

63

superior man of action who could “step over the line.” 17 Like Lance Lamar’s later murder of Janos Jacoby, Raskolnikov’s murderous act is a desperate attempt to claim a “heroic” identity through violence. As he had done with Rozumikhin, Luzhin, and Sonya, Dostoevsky uses the investigator Porfiry Petrovich to link Raskolnikov’s murderous act and subsequent rationalizations to the emerging utilitarian ideology and its broader moral implications. To repeat Porfiry’s crucial statement about Raskolnikov, “We’re dealing with a quite fantastic affair here, a somber affair, a modern one, a case characteristic of our time, when men’s hearts have grown rank and foul, when you hear the phrase quoted that blood ‘revives’; when comfort is held up as the only worth-while thing in life. We’re dealing with bookish dreams here, with a heart exacerbated by theories.” 18 Raskolnikov, as Porfiry sees, represents the autonomous man emerging in Russian society, the self-willed, potentially demonic self that Percy will later analyze thoroughly in Lost in the Cosmos. Roskolnikov is a divided self, split between abstract, rational mind and his heart and conscience, a split in the self that Percy found even more exacerbated in the twentieth century. Porfiry advises Raskolnikov that the path to healing the divided self is through suffering and humility. “Suffering is not such a bad thing. Suffer for a bit. Give yourself up to life without thinking. Suffering is a great thing.” 19 As I have noted, Percy’s protagonists, who suffer various ordeals, will begin to discover a similar path to healing. Like Sonya, Porfiry knows that suffering without faith in God can embitter and further alienate Raskolnikov, who lacks such faith. He encourages Raskolnikov to “pray to God” and humbly accept his future suffering in prison.20 Raskolnikov initially rejects Porfiry’s advice. Proud and bent on selfjustification, he believes that he is being sent to prison because of his tactical “mistakes” in committing murder. Still convinced of his own superiority, he remains isolated from the other prisoners and contemptuous of their ignorance and crudeness. Prior to the much-debated epilogue, his spiritual fate remains uncertain. In the epilogue, Dostoevsky makes clear 17. Ibid., 431–32. 18. Ibid., 467 (my emphasis). 19. Ibid., 471–73. 20. Ibid., 472.

64 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

that Raskolnikov must undergo a long period of suffering to transform his mind and heart and heal his divided self and his alienation from life. His transformation begins after a bout of sickness and suffering, a change aided by the steadfast support of Sonya, whose benevolence extends to all prisoners, not just Raskolnikov. Through her, he begins to see that suffering is not meaningless; it is made meaningful by faith in God and exemplified by Sonya’s loving commitment to fellow sufferers. She has grasped the wisdom later voiced by the elder Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov—that all are guilty of sin and that “all are responsible for all.” Gradually, through her example, Raskolnikov begins to reconcile with the other prisoners and accept their common humanity. His transformation culminates during the last weeks of Lent and Easter Week, when he lies sick in the hospital. Here, Dostoevsky links his personal trials to the larger debate between religious faith and the new revolutionary ideologies, an opposition symbolized in Raskolnikov’s nightmarish dream of a godless society based on man’s autonomous reason and willto-power, the very ideology he had earlier claimed for himself. In the prophetic nightmare he sees all Europe infected with plague, “new kinds of germs” that are demonic “spirits endowed with reason and will” and that drive their victims “mad and violent.” None of the victims believe “their decisions, their scientific conclusions, and their moral convictions” were anything but “incontestably right.” There is no longer any metaphysical order or moral coherence in society; relativism reigns supreme. In a passage that particularly forecast modern linguistic relativism, each victim “believed that the truth only resided in him” and that when they “could not agree what was good or what was evil, they began to slaughter each other until wholesale destruction stalked the earth.” 21 Raskolnikov’s apocalyptic dream is Dostoevsky’s prophetic vision of a suicidal future society driven to self-destruction by the intellectual and moral fragmentation inspired by the competition and violence of new ideologies. As such, it anticipates the general moral and social plague and suicidal drift that Percy dramatized later in Love in the Ruins, Lancelot, and The Thanatos Syndrome. Raskolnikov recovers from his nightmare and sickness to realize, at 21. Ibid., 555–56.

Crime and Punishment: A Modern Case 

65

Eastertime, that he loves Sonya and that with her, there is the possibility of a “new future, a full resurrection to a new life.” He also realizes that “he would hardly have been able to solve any of his problems consciously; he could only feel. Life had taken the place of dialectics, and something quite different had to work itself out in his mind.” The still-proud Raskolnikov faces a long road of suffering ahead. In the last paragraph, Dostoevsky stresses that ahead lies “the beginning of a new story, of the gradual birth as a man, of his gradual regeneration, of his gradual passing from one world to another, of his acquaintance with a new and hitherto unknown reality.” 22 Dostoevsky does not predict the outcome of Raskolnikov’s search, except to show that the humbled ex-student has already discovered a better understanding of himself, of who he is as a man. As I noted, Dostoevsky’s epilogue to the novel has been the subject of much critical debate. Some critics and readers have found it to be too explicitly didactic an expression of the author’s faith. Whatever the literary or aesthetic merits or defects of the epilogue, it reveals Dostoevsky’s unequivocal judgment about a possible religious recovery from the spiritual predicament Raskolnikov’s story represents, at least for the individual. To that extent, it offers a provisional answer to the debate between secular ideologies and the Christian faith presented in the novel. Such an answer to the debate through conversion of heart was not available to Percy the novelist in the twentieth century. As he recognized, such didactically stated Christian themes would not resonate with postmodern readers as they still did for Dostoevsky’s nominally Orthodox readers. Percy’s audience is much more skeptical, and, as he often noted, the language and tropes of traditional Christianity have become as worn as out as “old poker chips.” Consequently, his novels are more tentative, inconclusive, and open-ended. Nevertheless, their inconclusiveness does serve to reinforce a theological point. Rather than clearly suggest a Christian solution, Percy leaves his protagonists balanced precariously on the razor’s edge between the pull of despair on the one hand and, on the other, the possible hope for recovery and discovery of a fully human self, which for Percy is precisely the predicament of the age.

6 22. Ibid., 557, 558, 559.

66 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

To my knowledge, Percy never discussed Svidrigalov in any of his essays and interviews, but it is hard to imagine his not being fascinated by Dostoevsky’s portrayal of this child fetishist, sexual predator, suspected murderer, and suicide victim. In the case of Svidrigalov Dostoevsky showed the interrelationship between the utilitarian ideology, sexual predation, and eventual suicide, so that Svidrigalov represents an extreme type of the amoral “autonomous man.” He mirrors both Raskolnikov and Luzhin in this regard, as Frank has shown.23 His abortive search for meaning, focused on the vain dream that the virtuous Dunya might save him, is a perversion of the Raskolnikov-Sonya relationship, since he cannot overcome his compulsion to stalk, humiliate, and sexually abuse women. As a representative type, he anticipates Percy’s analysis of the relationship between the autonomous man, sexual dysfunction, demonic violence, and the suicidal self in Lost in the Cosmos, also dramatized in characters Dr. Sutter Vaught in The Last Gentleman and Lance Lamar in Lancelot. Although Svidrigalov is guilty of what Dostoevsky considered the most diabolical act—the seduction of a young girl—he is not presented entirely as a totally alienated loner or moral monster. Like Totsky in The Idiot and Stavrogin in Demons, he embodies the social type of the wealthy, bored, predatory class Dostoevsky knew well and despised. Svidrigalov is an educated, sophisticated gentleman who is generally accepted in society. While he is truly demonic in his sexual perversity and violence, he is also a sentimental man whose generous impulses are undermined by erotic compulsions. His child fetish is fed by a decadent romantic longing for a “child world” of innocence, a mock Eden, a longing he shares with the later Lance Lamar. The collapse of his fantastic dream eventually leads to suicide. He is attracted by Dunya’s beauty, nobility, and virtue, but he also wishes to corrupt and humiliate her. Yet he also claims to be “fond of children,” and he does provide money to support the Marmeladov children after the death of their drunken father. But his rare generous impulses are no match for his destructive erotic compulsions. As a social type, Svidrigalov represents the amoral rationalist-utilitarian sensualist Dostoevsky saw emerging in Russia among the intellectuals who 23. Frank, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 499–506.

Crime and Punishment: A Modern Case 

67

had abandoned religious faith. In a conversation with Raskolnikov, Svidrigalov claims that, before coming to Petersburg for “vice,” there was “nothing criminal” in his advances toward the virtuous Dunya, “taking the common sense view of it,” an argument that echoes Raskolnikov’s earlier claim that there was “no crime” in murdering the pawnbroker.24 Like Luzhin, Svidrigalov’s “common sense” view of reality means the exercise of pragmatic principles in a world governed by “laws of nature.” He excuses his behavior by arguing that, like everyone else, he is merely “human” and a “victim” of nature. “Reason, after all, is the mere slave of passion,” he claims. Though he admits to having beaten his wife and is strongly suspected in her death, Svidrigalov says, “My conscience is clear as far as my wife is concerned.” 25 Later we learn from Luzhin that, before coming to Petersburg, Svidrigalov is rumored to have “interfered with” a “deaf and dumb” teenage girl who subsequently hanged herself. A criminal case against him was suppressed. He is also rumored to have persecuted his servant Philip, who also hanged himself.26 For Svidrigalov, there is no universal moral law; everyone is free to “step over the line” if they are able. He does not believe in an afterlife. His horrid vision of eternity is of “a village bathhouse, grimy, and spiders in every corner, and that’s all eternity is.” 27 Svidrigalov’s sexual perversity targets young women and girls, yet his relationship to them is a paradoxical mixture of romantic fantasy, erotic desire and repulsion, pity and brutality, a longing for innocence and for death. Insofar as he sees women as embodying these contradictory elements, he at once idealizes and hates them, relentlessly stalking both a drunken young prostitute and Sonya Marmeladov early in the novel. The truth underlying his fatal attraction is that he hates and fears women’s sexual nature as well as his own, a psychological double bind he shares to a lesser degree with Percy’s Lance Lamar, as we shall see later. To Raskolnikov he argues that human beings generally, and women particularly, “enjoy being humiliated. I’d even go so far as to say that that’s the only thing that matters to them.” 28 Like the businessman Lozhin, women are 24. Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, 296, 482. 25. Ibid., 297. 26. Ibid., 314. 27. Ibid., 305. 28. Ibid., 298.

68 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

only useful to him as objects to be subjugated and humiliated. Though he claims to be attracted to Dunya’s virtue, he ridicules it by calling her “morbidly chaste” and the victim of a compulsion to suffer martyrdom.29 Yet he fears Dunya’s independence and power as a mature woman. Consequently, his lurid attraction is focused on young women and girls, especially the vulnerable and submissive. In truth, Svidrigalov would like to use all women as children, as pliable sex objects to exploit, a compulsion Percy came to analyze extensively in Lost in the Cosmos, in Lancelot, and in the child molesters Dr. John Van Dorn and his fellow deviates in The Thanatos Syndrome. Near the end of the novel, Dostoevsky brilliantly dramatizes Svidrigalov’s obsession in his nightmare just before his suicide. Having already decided to kill himself, Svidrigalov lies in bed in a cheap hotel near the Little Neva River. From his earlier experiences, he has come to associate seduced women, suicide, and his fear of water. Unable to sleep, he thinks of the virtuous Dunya, wondering vainly if “she would have made a different man of me somehow.” He then dreams of a “delightful, flowering landscape” on “Trinity Day,” of a room scented with narcissi, in its midst a coffin “garlanded with flowers” holding the corpse of a young girl dressed in white, whom he remembers as the fourteen-year-old rape-suicide victim he had seen earlier.30 Thinking of suicide, he ventures out into the corridor, where he finds a ragged five-year-old girl crouched by the door, hiding from her mother for fear of a beating. He takes her into his room, undresses and cleans her, then puts her in his warm bed. The girl seems to sleep, but then regards him “as though a pair of sly, sharp little eyes were winking at him not at all in a childish way.” Her gaze is “shameless and provocative”; her eyes “invited, they laughed. There was something infinitely horrible and outrageous in that laughter, in those eyes.” When she reaches out to him, he yells, “Damn you!” in horror, raises his hand to strike her, and then “wakes up.” 31 Svidrigalov’s earlier fantasy of and longing for child-like innocence—the dead girl in the white dress—is shattered. Woman’s duplicitous sexuality, seen in the bold five-year-old, is in his mind a trap leading only to death. Devastated by the nightmare, he flees to the riverside and commits suicide with a pistol. 29. Ibid., 487. 30. Ibid., 517. 31. Ibid., 521.

Crime and Punishment: A Modern Case 

69

Dostoevsky’s brilliant fusion of nightmare and actuality in this scene reveals the inner dynamic of unresolved sexual conflict that leads Svidrigalov to despair and suicide. While his sexual depravity certainly does not represent a Russian norm in the 1860s, he does represent what Dostoevsky saw as one disastrous consequence of the loss of religious faith among those amoral utilitarians who feel free to “step over the line” in personal relations. In Svidrigalov, Dostoevsky poses the question: if God does not exist, and the world is one in which “anything is permitted,” why can’t a man rape a woman or child or murder a pawnbroker? And as if anticipating Percy’s crucial question in Lost in the Cosmos—“Where do all the child molesters come from?” —just before killing himself Svidrigalov tells a bystander, “When they ask you about it, tell them he’s gone to America.” 32

6 Dostoevsky’s portrayal of Svidrigalov as a perverted rational-utilitarian linked by ideology to Raskolnikov and Luzhim suggests another important link to Percy. We discover that link when we consider Svidrigalov in relation to the broader, complicated issue of erotic relations in general in Dostoevsky’s fiction. Some critics, like theologian Paul Evdocimov, fault Dostoevsky for failing to develop the erotic dimension of relationships between the sexes in his stories. In his view, “Dostoevsky’s conception of love more or less excludes any idea of eros as a ‘sublimating power’ drawing together the resources of male and female in a healing balance or freedom.” In his novels, “woman has no authority or independent existence; she is only the destiny of man.” 33 Evdocimov’s broad criticism seems oversimplified when we consider the many strong women in Dostoevsky’s stories and their complicated erotic relations with men, often in defiance of paternalistic cultural norms in nineteenth-century Russia. But his criticism does raise the question of the deeper meaning of erotic desire within the emerging rational-utilitarian ideology, a question Percy would examine more directly in Lost in the Cosmos. In his excellent study of Dostoevsky, Rowan Williams sees the author’s treatment of erotic relations as part of his “negative theology, [wherein] the 32. Ibid., 523. 33. Paul Evdocimov, cited in Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2008), 178–79.

70 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

significance of eros is defined largely by the tracing of its absence or perversion.” 34 Williams argues that “a denial or frustration of sexual union and balance” is a sign of “demoniac” possession; that is, a sign of the failure to achieve a reasonable sexual maturity in the relationship between men and women, one that fosters erotic relations within the wider context of relations of friendship, companionship, and parental responsibility. Failure to achieve “erotic responsibility,” he argues, reveals a character’s “failure to deal with real otherness.” 35 This failure, seen throughout Dostoevsky’s fiction, is fostered by “demonism” in those male protagonists, who see the “other”—women—as objects to be possessed, manipulated, and sexually abused. We think immediately of Svidrigalov, Totsky, Stavrogin, Fyodor Karamazov, and others. In effect, women are reduced by them to the status of dependent children, sometimes simultaneously and perversely idealized, yet always subject to the will of the demonic possessor. Such characters embody the essence of the child-molester type. In Lost in the Cosmos, Percy explicitly developed the relationship between erotic desire, sexual perversion, demonic possession, and the new ideology of autonomous man. The pattern is further developed in his fiction, as we shall see later. In Cosmos, he addressed a crucial question: how does the fracturing of the self that has been fostered by the ideology of reason and science—the split between rational mind and emotion and will—impact erotic desire and sexual relations in a postmodern culture marked by waning allegiance to the traditional Judeo-Christian moral code and the rise of secular-utilitarian ideologies? The question is enormously complicated, of course, but one way to explore it is to see what Rowan Williams described as Dostoevsky’s “negative theology” vis-à-vis sexual relations as prophetically anticipating Percy’s further development of the theme. In his discussion of the demoniac self, Percy asked the question, “Why is it that the autonomous self becomes possessed by the spirit of the erotic and the secret love of violence?” 36 Following Kierkegaard, Percy argued that under Christianity the erotic spirit was “qualified,” that is, guided by spiritual and moral principles. But under the secular utilitarian ideologies, the au34. Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction, 179; bracketed text is my addition. 35. Ibid., 179–80. 36. Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), 175.

Crime and Punishment: A Modern Case 

71

tonomous self becomes possessed by the erotic spirit as a demoniac force that leads to perverse sexual relations (promiscuity, pornography, rape), violence, and self-destruction. The fractured self, rational on the one hand and sensual on the other, adopts an “objective” view of reality and reduces the “other”—women—to objects to be possessed and exploited.37 Generally, the situation is not quite so explicitly manifested in Dostoevsky’s society, where, as I have said, a core of traditional Christian moral values was still strong, especially, he believed, among ordinary peasant believers. But there are ominous signs of the future demoniac self in Svidrigalov, Stavrogin, Totsky, Luzhin, and others, all of whom in different ways can be said to foreshadow what in twentieth-century technological society becomes, at least in Percy’s view, a more widespread “modern case.”

37. Ibid., 176–88.

72 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

T he Idiot: Christ withou t Chris t Chap ter 4 The Idiot Christ without Christ

Having dramatized the fate of alienated, hyper-conscious rationalists in the underground man and Raskolnikov, Dostoevsky turned, after writing The Gambler, to the idea of depicting a “perfectly beautiful man,” as he told his brother Maikov.1 The idea had intrigued him for many years. He had no illusions about the difficulty of such an undertaking. In a January 1868 letter to his niece Sofya Ivanova, he said, “There is nothing more difficult in the world, and this is especially true today.” He added that “perfection is an ideal, and this ideal, whether it be ours or Europe’s, is still far from realization. There is only one positive figure in the world, namely Christ, so that the appearance of that infinitely good figure is itself a miracle.” 2 Given this fact,and given the inevitable differences between a novelist’s conception and its realization in fiction, any attempt to portray a “perfectly beautiful man” would necessarily be shaped by ambiguity, paradox, and irony. The very notion of ideal beauty was a mystery to Dostoevsky. In Demons, Stavrogin possesses physical beauty, but his character is satanic. In The Idiot, Prince Myshkin’s attraction to Nastasya Filippovna’s beauty and his noble 1. Michael Holquist, “The Gaps in Christology: The Idiot,” in Dostoevsky: New Perspectives, ed. Robert L. Jackson (Englewood, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1984), 126. 2. Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time, ed. Mary Petrusewicz (Princeton, N.J., and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), 577; Victor Terras, Reading Dostoevsky (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 27–28.

  73

intentions toward her, seemingly motivated by Christian agape, produce tragic results. If he is in some sense regarded as a Christ figure, as some have argued, it can only be as a failed or mock Christ. The intriguing problem is to analyze the nature of his failure and its broad social, moral, and religious implications. If in Raskolnikov Dostoevsky presented the modern case of an isolated, hyper-conscious rationalist, in Myshkin he presented the modern case of the good man of noble ethical principles whose actions, corrupted by excessive pity, prove disastrous for himself and others. Like the underground man and Raskolnikov, Myshkin is both an individual figure and a type. As a type, he embodies the modern split between ethical sensibility and religious faith, a split that leads to a secular humanitarian pity that both Dostoevsky and Percy saw as destructive. Dostoevsky’s novel of the saintly Prince resonated with Percy’s fiction in complex ways. In an interview with Ashley Brown, Percy claimed that Will Barrett in The Last Gentleman “bears a conscious kinship to Prince Myshkin.” 3 Later, alluding to Kierkegaard, he said that Barrett lives in “the religious mode.” Percy’s claim is peculiar, given that Kierkegaard’s notion of the religious mode is explicitly Christian and demands a “leap of faith” in the face of the absurd. Barrett expresses no interest in Christianity, nor does he make a leap of faith; neither does he seem to possess a Kierkegaardian religious consciousness. Yet Percy often adapted what he learned from many thinkers, along with Kierkegaard, to suit his own fictional purposes. Myshkin and Barrett do share a certain spiritual kinship, as we shall see later. In their case, just as Dostoevsky used the perfect man, Jesus Christ, as an ironic model for Myshkin, Percy used Myshkin, I shall argue, as an ironic model for Barrett. There are, as we shall also see, as many differences between the two protagonists as there are similarities. Moreover, the broad range of ideological, moral, and religious themes in The Idiot are developed in several of Percy’s works—in The Moviegoer, Lancelot, Love in the Ruins, and in several essays—and not just in The Last Gentleman. As in the Notes and Crime and Punishment, literal and spiritual suicide is an important theme in The Idiot as in Percy’s writings. Dostoevsky’s tale of the beautiful young man corrupted by sentimental pity anticipates Percy’s analysis of the 3. Lewis A. Lawson and Victor A. Kramer, eds., Conversations with Walker Percy (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985), 12.

74 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

postmodern erosion of Christian faith and the fatal split between ethics and religion that leads to pseudo-Christian secular humanism in the twentieth century. At the same time, The Idiot illuminates some sharp differences between Dostoevsky the Orthodox believer and Percy the Catholic writer schooled in the Christian tradition in the West. My plan in this chapter is first to examine the question of Myshkin as a “Christ figure,” especially as Dostoevsky ironized it in the Prince’s relationship to Nastasya Filippovna, and to trace the broader ideological implications of that relationship as they relate to the novel as a whole and to Percy’s writings. Additionally, I plan to examine the similarities and differences between Myshkin and young Will Barrett, between The Idiot and Percy’s other works, and between Dostoevsky and Percy as prophets of the modern and postmodern age.

6 Much of the critical discussion of The Idiot has focused on the question of Myshkin’s actual or putative identity as a Christ figure. Dostoevsky cast the Prince in a dual tradition: that of the holy fool and that of the sacrificial victim whose exemplary life and actions are a reproach to the faithless, selfish culture that surrounds him. How we respond to Myshkin’s character is the key to understanding his significance in the novel and his relationship (and Dostoevsky’s) to Percy’s works. On the one hand, his benevolent nature, his intelligence and altruism, his acute sensitivity to others’ suffering, and his unselfish response to their needs strongly suggest a Christ-like character. On the other hand, his foolish transcendent idealism and naivety, his passive response to evil, and his excessive, exculpating pity serve to undermine any unequivocal identification of him with Christ.4 Myshkin’s actions, in my view, betray the sentimentalism that resulted from the growing fissure between ethical concern for others and religious faith that Percy and other thinkers saw as endemic in modern, “post-Christian” society. This split, as we shall see, is at the root of the meaning of Myshkin and Percy’s protagonists as castaways who are alienated from the increasing secularization in 4. See, for example, Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time, 577–89; Holquist, “Gaps in Christology,” 126–45; Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2008), 46–58; Rene Girard, Resurrection from the Underground, ed., trans. James G. Williams (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012), 34–50; Romano Guardini, “Dostoevsky’s Idiot: A Symbol of Christ,” Crosscurrents 6 (1956): 359–82.

 

The Idiot: Christ without Christ 

75

nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture, in which the traditional Christian moral principles of action once rooted in the person of Christ are slowly eroding. Faced with this predicament, the castaways struggle to understand their predicament as castaways and find a way to live in the world. Given this evolving cultural situation, how is Myshkin’s predicament to be understood? Joseph Frank has argued that Myshkin’s Christ-like identity is closely related to his epilepsy, which to Frank signifies both the Prince’s transcendent vision of reality and his estrangement from ordinary life. In his view, Myshkin’s seizures are a sign of his “eschatological consciousness,” which alienates him from a world driven by egoism, greed, erotic desire, and lust for power.5 The Prince “lives in the eschatological tension that was (and is) the soul of the primitive ethic, whose doctrine of totally selfless agape was conceived in the same ethic as the imminent end of time.” 6 By “primitive ethic” Frank presumably means the ideal of Christian virtue embodied in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Frank claims that Myshkin’s seizures are death-like experiences that bring an intense awareness of the apocalyptic “end of time” and a sense of “the imminent value of each moment as it approaches”; he has the power to “feel each moment as one of absolute ethical choice and responsibility.” Broadening Frank’s view, theologian Romano Guardini claimed that the Prince has a “divine mission” in the world—that is, to always live out the ethic of agape in his relations with others.7 This is to claim a great deal for Myshkin, viewed in the light of his actual behavior. Frank’s argument for the Prince’s “eschatological consciousness” clearly presupposes a Christian context of meaning—that is, one in which eschatology is understood in terms of the belief that the Kingdom has already come as Jesus proclaimed, that the saving act has already been achieved by Christ, and that an apocalyptic end time has already occurred and is prologue to the Second Coming of Christ.8 However, little of this Christian context is presented in the novel. Neither is it revealed in Myshkin’s generous but misguided behavior toward Nas5. Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time, 578–80. 6. Ibid., 579. 7. Guardini, “Dostoevsky’s Idiot,” 361–70. 8. Gerhard Lohfink, No Irrelevant Jesus, trans. Linda M. Mahoney (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2014), 20–36; Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoit Chantre, trans. Mary Baker (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012), 109–10.

76 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

tasya. That Myshkin lives out a “divine mission” minute to minute seems a rather dubious claim. As Frank notes, Myshkin’s epileptic seizures paradoxically intensify both his estrangement from the ordinary world as a “castaway” (Myshkin’s self-description) and his intense desire to experience the fullness of life. For example, sent to Switzerland for treatment after several seizures, he initially feels “unbearable sadness” and estrangement from the foreign place. But he gradually wins the affection of local children by his gentleness and by his platonic love for the seduced, outcast girl, Marie. As this suggests, his attraction to the child-world reveals a longing for ideality that will later betray him in his relations with the adult women in his life, Nastasy Filippovna and Aglaya Epanchin. Despite his fondness for Marie and the children, he still feels a “great restlessness” and “a call to go somewhere,” convinced that “if I walked straight ahead and kept on for a long, long time, and went beyond the line where earth and sky meet, the whole answer would be there.” He imagines finding “a new life, a thousand times stronger and busier than ours.” 9 Myshkin’s experience of longing here seems that of a youthful romantic rather than that of one with a deeply Christian eschatological sense. Later, he recalls a day of wandering in the mountains amidst “the shining sky, below him the lake, around him the horizon, bright and infinite, as if it went on forever.” The beautiful scene makes him weep. He feels “a total stranger” to this “great everlasting feast” that he can never join, “a stranger to everything and a castaway.” 10 (In The Moviegoer, Binx Bolling also calls himself a castaway.) Percy, as we shall see, discussed the predicament of the castaway in very different terms in “The Message in the Bottle.” 11 Frank interprets Myshkin’s restlessness as a sign of his eschatological sense—“the call to go beyond where earth and sky meet”—which is a far cry from the Christian eschatological view that, because of Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom of God, the eschatological moment is present, here and now. The archaic view of the end time has been secularized in Frank’s interpretation 9. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, introduction Richard Pevear (New York: Vintage, 2003), 59. 10. Ibid., 423. 11. Walker Percy, “The Message in the Bottle,” in The Message in the Bottle (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 119–50.

 

The Idiot: Christ without Christ 

77

of Myshkin. Moreover, in his rhapsody Myshkin also mentions Naples as a “livelier, noisier” place and a possible destination, which suggests his longing as the patient to escape his narrow life in Switzerland and pursue the Ideal, rather than being evidence of a Christian eschatological sense. Myshkin’s epilepsy may partly suggest a temporary experience of transcendence, but it also reveals a fatal split in his character that will betray him later. In fact, the Prince himself is unsure of the meaning of his seizures. He recalls how just before an attack his brain would “catch fire” and fill him with “the sense of life” and a “self-awareness” (that) “increased tenfold.” He experiences a sort of “sublime tranquility, filled with supreme, harmonious joy, and hope, filled with reason and ultimate cause.” 12 But when the ecstatic moment passes, he is left wondering if “all those flashes and glimpses of a higher self-awareness and of ‘the highest being’ were nothing but an illness.” Nevertheless, he insists that such moments “might be worth his whole life” and tells his friend Rogozhin that “at that moment I was somehow able to understand the extraordinary phrase that time shall be no more.” 13 Frank interprets this remark as Dostoevsky’s allusion to the book of Revelation and as further proof of Myshkin’s eschatological sense. But the Prince’s language is abstract—“reason and ultimate cause,” “the highest being,” sublime tranquility”, so much so that Dostoevsky seems to undercut Myshkin’s sense of the ecstatic moment, suggesting that it is more platonic/romantic than biblical/Christian. Yet while Dostoevsky’s portrayal here seems more ironic that being that of an imitatio Christi, it may also reflect something of the author’s own romantic idealism. Frank also claims, as I noted, that Myshkin’s eschatological sense gives him the power “to feel each moment as one of absolute ethical choice and responsibility.” 14 The difficulty with such a claim is that it glosses over Christ’s incarnation into history and how his proclamation of the Kingdom (Mt 4:17) transformed archaic notions of time and eschatology. Given that proclamation, the challenge is to live out that charism through faith in Christ, whom the Prince fails to mention. Frank acknowledges that Myshkin is unable to balance the tension between his eschatological sense and the challenges he 12. Dostoevsky, The Idiot, 226. 13. Ibid., 226, 227. 14. Ibid., 579.

78 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

faces in life, which eventually lead to moral paralysis and a “loss of identity.” 15 At crucial times, Myshkin’s behavior exhibits a crippling, fatal division between his ideal, transcendental aspirations, on the one hand, and the demands for ethical action in the world on the other. As Rene Girard has argued, the Myshkin we discover in the novel is modeled more on Dostoevsky’s romantic ideal of Christ than on the God-man of history.16 Myshkin himself realizes that his rapturous vision of “the highest synthesis of life” cannot be sustained in the actual world. In a conversation with the three Epanchin girls, he recounts his meeting with a man condemned to death who was granted a last-minute reprieve, as Dostoevsky himself was. The ex-convict describes how just before the scheduled execution he vowed that if he were somehow spared and allowed to live, “then I’d turn every moment into a whole age, I’d lose nothing, I’d reckon up each minute separately, I’d let nothing be wasted.” 17 When Alexandra Epanchin asks him if the man lived “reckoning up every minute,” Myshkin replies, “No, he didn’t live that was at all and lost many, many minutes.” But when Aglaya says, “You think you can live more intelligently than anyone else,” Myshkin answers, “Yes, I’ve always thought so, and I still do.” 18 The Prince may long to live each moment “eschatologically”—that is, like Christ, but like everyone else he fails to do so. Living in time and history prevents such absolute faithfulness and fulfillment. In his perceptive essay on the novel, Romano Guardini argues that only the perfect God-man, Christ, can do so. “Only God succeeds in realizing pure humanity. To be truly man is not a natural thing. For the simple forces of man, this is something impossible. The notion of ‘human man’ conceals an ideology.” 19 The ideology concealed is the secular belief that the “autonomous man” or “man-God” can fulfill his earthly being independent of Christ and without taking account of his eternal destiny. Like Kierkegaard, both Dostoevsky and Percy reject this ideology.

6 Myshkin’s destiny is sealed from the moment he first glimpses Nastasya Filippovna’s portrait at the Epanchin house and is captivated by her “ex15. Ibid., 587–88. 16. Girard, Resurrection from the Underground, 34. 17. Dostoevsky, The Idiot, 61. 18. Ibid., 61–62. 19. Guardini, “Dostoevsky’s Idiot,” 360.

 

The Idiot: Christ without Christ 

79

traordinary beauty.” 20 “It’s a gay face,” he tells General Epanchin, “but she has suffered terribly, eh? It’s a proud face, terribly proud, but I don’t know if she’s kind or not. Oh, if only she were kind! Everything would be saved!” 21 Later, viewing the portrait alone, Myshkin sees a deeper mystery in her face. Her beauty is extraordinary but deceptive. It reveals a “boundless pride and contempt, almost hatred,” combined with “something trusting, surprisingly simple-hearted,” a duality that evokes in him “some sort of compassion.” His compassion will evolve into an exaggerated pity for Nastasya, one that exaggerates her “nobility” and inspires in him a desire to “save” her soul. He will ignore Adelaide Epanchin’s warning that “such beauty has power. You can overturn the world with such power.” 22 Indeed, her beauty has overturned Myshkin’s world. Myshkin’s attraction to Nastasya is platonic, not physical. Guardini contends that the Prince regards beauty as a “metaphysical” quality that expresses “a state of perfection” that inspires his love of her. But he also notes that Dostoevsky believed Christ to be the only incarnation of perfect beauty in human form. All else could be idolatrous or destructive, like Stavrogin’s destructive beauty in Demons. Beauty’s ambiguous power, such as Nastasya’s, can “blossom in evil, disorder, indifference or even silliness.” 23 As Dmitri Karamazov remarks later, “Beauty is a terrible and awful thing. A man of lofty mind and heart begins with the ideal of the Madonna and ends with the ideal of Sodom. Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.” 24 (In The Moviegoer, Binx Bolling wryly remarks that “beauty is a whore. Money is a better God than beauty. Beauty, the quest for beauty alone, is a whoredom.”) Myshkin sees the ambiguity of Nastasya’s beauty but is enraptured by her as an ideal. Her actions, however, do not justify his vision. When he later attends the birthday party at which she is expected to choose a husband (Ganya and Rogozhin are bargaining for her with money), Myshkin sees that she is crippled by pride, willfulness, a vindictive desire for revenge 20. Dostoevsky, The Idiot, 31. 21. Ibid., 36. 22. Ibid., 79–80. 23. Guardini, “Dostoevsky’s Idiot,” 367. 24. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans., annotated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 156–57.

80 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

against her seducer Totsky, and a despair that makes it impossible for her to live up to his ideal. While he tries to envision her as a woman of noble soul, a Madonna figure, she is determined to “play the whore” and is doomed by her self-hatred and a masochistic will to act as a “streetwalker.” Her fate is tragic, as Dostoevsky intended. As a young girl she was seduced by Totsky, a child molester like Svidrigalov, and later, Stavrogin, guilty like them of what Dostoevsky considered the worst sin and crime.25 Totsky destroyed her child-like innocence, a violation that helps drive her to a suicidal relationship with Rogozhin, her eventual murderer. Yet of all the party guests, Myshkin alone recognizes her tragic nobility and her deep suffering, which she acknowledges by calling him “the first truly devoted man in my whole life.” 26 Moved by pity and a desire to save her from a terrible fate with the violent Rogozhin, Myshkin offers to marry her. But his heroic gesture only enflames her troubled spirit. Knowing she could never match his ideal of her and that their marriage would only bring suffering to them both, Nastasya rejects his offer. She refuses to ruin “such a baby,” as Totsky ruined her. Her image of Myshkin as a child “still (in) need of a nurse” reveals the regressive emotional undercurrent in their relationship. While she sees him as an innocent “child,” Myshkin sees her as one in need of “much care” and vows “I will take care of you.” 27 He wishes to become her savior. His offer is both altruistic and patronizing; since he imagines her as a dependent woman to be cared for, he fails to see that she is an adult, free, sexually desirable woman. Myshkin’s paternalism combines with an overpowering pity and idealism that effectively effaces her complex adult identity. In his attitude toward Nastasya, Myshkin ignores the complexity of adult desire and the erotic dimension of male-female relationships. Later, he assumes a similarly idealized attitude toward the egoistic Aglaya Epanchin. Referring to the Prince’s relationship to both women, Guardini asked whether his epilepsy “might express a relationship not only to that which surpasses history, but also the refusal of moral maturity and responsibility.” He also questions whether Myshkin’s fondness for children 25. Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time, 449. 26. Dostoevsky, The Idiot, 154. 27. Ibid., 169, 168.

  The Idiot: Christ without Christ  81

might “signify not only a communication with sacred innocence but an enthrallment to some puerility.” Likewise, he questions whether Myshkin’s adopting “an attitude which accepts everything and never judges” signals an unwillingness to confront and struggle with “distinctions between good and evil,” hardly a Christ-like quality.28 Rowan Williams takes an even sharper view and sees the Prince’s selfsacrificing “virtue” as a refusal of mature sexual identity and human responsibility. To him, Myshkin “makes no adult choices” and remains passive in situations where some show of erotic desire for either Nastasya or Aglaya might normally be expected. Indeed, his quixotic behavior makes him deeply complicit in Nastasya’s murder by Rogozhin and in Aglaya’s unhappy marriage. For Williams, this “perfectly beautiful man” is a deeply flawed, ineffectual individual.29 Similarly, Frank concludes that the Prince’s failure to resolve his “transcendental” love for Nastasya and Aglala leads to his paralysis and the eventual “dissolving” of his personality. Never­theless, Frank says that despite Myshkin’s “practical” failures, his commitment to the ideal of universal love triumphs over his tragedy.30 But such a conclusion seems difficult to justify when we see the Prince at the end of the novel, returning once again as a patient to the “child world” in Switzerland from whence he came at the beginning of the novel.

6 The key to Myshkin’s failure—his idealized vision corrupted by excessive pity—can be seen in his crucial decision to pursue and try to “save” Nastasya after she rejects his offer of marriage and leaves the birthday party with Rogozhin. His overpowering pity trumps good judgment and genuine Christian caritas. After the party, he disappears from Petersburg for six months. We learn that the relationship between Nastasya and Rogozhim is tumultuous (he admits beating her), and that at one point she abandoned him and their marriage plan and lives, chastely, with Myshkin, but then she leaves him as well. Her increasingly erratic behavior is a sign of the madness about to engulf all three of them. Shortly after returning to Petersburg, Myshkin visits Rogozhin at his 28. Guardini, “Dostoevsky’s Idiot,” 378. 29. Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction, 44–57. 30. Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time, 558.

82 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

dark, gloomy home to assure his rival that he will not hinder Rogozhin’s plan to marry Nastasya, a pledge he later breaks when he becomes engaged to her. He tells Rogozhin that “I love her, not with love, but with pity.” Later, when Myshkin aborts his expected engagement to Aglaya in favor of Nastasya, Radomsky pointedly asks him, “How far can compassion go, eh?” 31 As this question suggests, Myshkin’s pity for Nastasya undermines genuine compassion; his pity for her degenerates into a kind of sentimental humanism. In the scene at Rogozhin’s house, Dostoevsky creates a link between the Prince’s corruption of true caritas and the larger philosophical and religious issues Dostoevsky raises in the novel, which marks a sharp difference from Percy, as we shall see later. The link between Myshkin’s pity and these larger issues is revealed in his conversation with Rogozhin about religious faith after they view Holbein’s painting of the dead Christ, the portrait of a Christ who, it is claimed, was destroyed by the “laws of nature.” 32 Prompted by the painting’s grim theme, Rogozhin asks the Prince if he believes in God. Myshkin never answers the question directly. Instead, he remarks that “a man could lose his faith from that painting,” as apparently has happened to Rogozhin and the dying young consumptive Ippolit. Stirred to respond, Myshkin explains his idea (and Dostoevsky’s) of true religious faith in Russia. He describes his four recent encounters with ordinary Russians, each incident designed to show that a mysterious, intuitive core of religious faith exists in the heart of all Russians, a faith distinct from ordinary reason. Myshkin’s last encounter was with a peasant woman who rejoiced over the first smile of her baby and who tells him that God rejoices in the same way when a sinner prays. Myshkin insists to Rogozhin that her thought “expressed the whole thought of Christianity, that is, the whole idea of God as our father and that God rejoices over man as a father over his own child, the main thought of Christ!” He concludes that “the essence of religious feeling doesn’t fit in with any reasoning, with any crimes and trespasses, with any atheisms; there’s something there that is not that, and will eternally be not that. But the main thing is that one can observe it sooner and more clearly in the 31. Dostoevsky, The Idiot, 208, 581. 32. Percy developed a counter-symbol in the symbolic death and “resurrection” of Will Barrett in The Second Coming (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), 235–36.

 

The Idiot: Christ without Christ 

83

Russian heart.” 33 Myshkin’s four examples of “the essence of Christianity” all concern repentant sinners, fit subjects for divine mercy. But Rogozhin, Nastasya, and Ippolit are not repentant sinners. Nastasya and Rogozhin are reckless, self-destructive personalities driven by suicidal despair; Ippolit is an atheist and a bitter, self-pitying nihilist. I stress the importance of this scene because it reveals a sharp division between Dostoevsky’s and Percy’s understanding of the essence of the Christian faith, as we shall see. Additionally, it expresses Dostoevsky’s romantic nationalism and his support for the political conservatism of the Tsarist regime. Myshkin’s claims of ordinary Russians’ intuitive “religious feelings” for God-as-Father express Dostoevsky’s own nativist faith. Frank has argued that Dostoevsky’s belief is closest to the antinomy between religious faith and reason espoused by Soren Kierkegaard.34 The claim seems oversimplified, in my view. (As we shall see, Percy the Catholic later rejected this antinomy in his important essay “The Message in the Bottle.”) Myshkin’s antinomous argument for subjective “religious faith” independent of reason shapes his sentimental pity for Nastaya and his passion to save her as a sinner. In his pity for her he tries to appropriate the role of God-Father and surrogate Christ-figure by regarding Nastasya as a pathetic child to be protected and nurtured at all costs. The truth of Myshkin’s flawed pity is revealed figuratively when Nastasya later writes him a letter in which she compares his relationship to her to a painting of Christ touching a child’s head.35 But Nastasya is not a child; neither is Myshkin God or Christ. She is a wealthy, independent adult woman with a complex character and history, not an adolescent to be pitied and protected. In his paternalism and pity Myshkin assumes the role of a mock Christ, a “Christ without Christ,” as Flannery O’Connor would say.36

6 Myshkin’s (and Dostoevsky’s) equating of the essence of Christianity with religious feeling takes on broader philosophical and religious implications 33. Dostoevsky, The Idiot, 221. 34. Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time, 211–12, 221–22. 35. Dostoevsky, The Idiot, 454. 36. Flannery O’Connor, Collected Works (New York: Literary Classics of America, 1988), 59.

84 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

when compared with Percy’s Catholic viewpoint. Myshkin’s nativist argument for essential Christianity in the heart of ordinary Russians provides the basis for his, and Dostoevsky’s, condemnation of the Catholic Church in the West, which anticipates similar attacks later by the Grand Inquisitor and by Percy’s Lance Lamar. During the party scene in part 4 of the novel, the benevolent Prince, speaking almost entirely out of character—and for Dostoevsky—condemns Roman Catholicism as “worse than atheism,” claiming that it preaches “the anti-Christ” because the church assumed temporal power and so is merely “a continuation of the Western Roman Empire.” Myshkin blames Catholicism for socialism and atheism as well; he says it has corrupted “the most holy, truthful, simple-hearted, ardent feelings of the people.” He claims that these feelings still abide in the Russian Orthodox faith in “our Christ whom we have preserved as they have never known, (and that) must shine forth as a response to the West.” Like his author, Myshkin sees “Russian civilization” as the only savior of the decadent West.37 Myshkin’s vastly oversimplified history lesson reflects Dostoevsky’s ethnocentric idealism and his hope for the future salvation of civilization through Russian Orthodoxy. Judged from the viewpoint of twentieth-century Russian history, his vision of the future obviously proved wildly wrong, especially after 1917. Myshkin’s piteous feeling for Nastasya and his belief that the “essence of Christianity” is based on feeling alone, in my view, represents a version of the modern split between the religious belief and ethical action and how this rupture degenerated into a sentimental response to assumed “victims.” It is important in this regard to recall St. Augustine’s view that the love of God and the love of others—genuine Christian caritas—are inseparable.38 But the two have become separated in Myshkin’s love for Nastasya. As Flannery O’Connor famously remarked, referring to Ivan Karamazov’s refusal of faith in God as long as one child is suffering, “in the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends

37. Dostoevsky, The Idiot, 543, 544, 545. 38. Garry Wills, St. Augustine (New York: Viking/Penguin, 1999), 14–15.

 

The Idiot: Christ without Christ 

85

in forced labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.” 39 In The Idiot, Myshkin’s “tenderness” for Nastasya, despite his good intentions, ends in her murder and his and Rogozhin’s mental breakdowns. Nevertheless, Frank argues that Myshkin embodies “the hope of the future.” 40 But unlike Christ, Myshkin has no disciples, he founds no religious movement, his actions prove disastrous for others, he suffers a nervous breakdown, and at the end is mostly dismissed as “an idiot.” Myshkin’s case represents, it seems to me, the paradox of modern secular humanism elucidated so well by Rene Girard in his book I See Satan Fall Like Lightning.41 As Girard points out, historically the Christian tradition has been at the root of the modern concern for victims. But paradoxically, it has also helped create its opposite: a concern for “victims” cut off from its metaphysical and religious basis in Christ, as O’Connor pointed out. The result is the “dead Jesus” of Holbein’s painting. Philosopher Charles Taylor makes a similar argument in Sources of the Self.42 When it is cut off in this way, concern can degenerate into a sentimentality that in its most perverse forms leads to the manipulation of individuals based on utopian, “humanitarian” theory and schemes for social “progress.” The result can be catastrophic for individual freedom and spiritual well-being. As we saw earlier, Dostoevsky foresaw and symbolized this prospect in the Crystal Palace and the ant-hill future society in Notes, as Percy will also show in Love in the Ruins and The Thanatos Syndrome. But Dostoevsky was unable to resist making the Prince a mouthpiece for his own sentimental nativism and his dubious claim that the Russian Orthodox faith could redeem all civilization. At the same time, Dostoevsky’s deep intuition of the consequences of the split between the ethical and the religious sense, played out in the fatal consequences of Myshkin’s pity, is also shown explicitly in his portrayal of two of Myshkin’s doubles in the novel, Lebedev and Ippolit.

6 Dostoevsky’s characterization of Lebedev and Ippolit dramatize his pessimism over many Russian intellectuals’ abandonment of the Orthodox 39. O’Connor, Collected Works, 830–31. 40. Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time, 589. 41. Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2001), 161–69. 42. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 516–18.

86 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

faith. Lebedev is a drunken, garrulous buffoon, but also the voice of Dostoevsky’s sharp attack on the increasing secularism and materialism of the age. Despite his hypocrisy and foolishness, Lebedev voices a deeply apocalyptic view of Russian history (without any reference to a Second Coming of Christ), one that condemns the spreading utilitarian culture and its values in terms of a religious vision that sees the power of Satan—“Wormwood”— now dominating human affairs to “muddy the well springs of life.” 43 Earlier in the novel, Lebedev pronounced that Russia was presently in the stage of the “black horse,” the sign of universal famine in Revelation 6:5–6. Later, in a conversation at Myshkin’s dacha, he challenges “all you atheists, you men of science, industry, associations, salaries and all the rest,” by asking them how they are going to create “universal peace, universal happiness—from necessity, without recognizing any moral foundations except the satisfaction of personal egoism and material necessity.” 44 Lebedev’s argument, of course, repeats similar Dostoevsky criticisms made in Notes (the Crystal Palace), Crime and Punishment, and later in Demons and The Brothers Karamazov. Here, Lebedev focuses on the reductive anthropology of the utilitarians, which assumes that the law of self-preservation is the “only normal law of mankind,” the antithesis of Myshkin’s belief in simple religious faith as the essence of Christian Russia. To Lebedev, the utilitarians accept famine as a necessary fact of the universal natural law—one of the ways that “superfluous” weak people are eliminated. Their claimed goal is to provide the greatest material good for the greatest number and create universal peace and happiness through material prosperity. For Lebedev, the central symbol of this ideology is technological: the rapidly expanding network of railroads in Russia and the West. Against the utilitarians’ deterministic anthropology, Lebedev insists that the “law of self-destruction and the law of self-preservation are equally strong in mankind! The devil rules equally over mankind until a limit in time still unknown to us.” The key question for Lebedev is “whether the ‘well springs of life’ ” have not been weakened by the increase of “all the hurrying, clanging, banging and speeding, they say, for the happiness of mankind!” When Kolya objects, insisting that the railroads deliver bread for suffering 43. Dostoevsky, The Idiot, 353. 44. Ibid., 374.

 

The Idiot: Christ without Christ 

87

mankind, Lebedev replies, “I, the vile Lebedev, do not believe in the carts that deliver bread to mankind! For carts that deliver bread to mankind, without any moral foundations for their actions, quite cold-bloodedly exclude a considerable portion of mankind from employing what they deliver.” As rambling as his speech is, the bibulous Lebedev expresses Dostoevsky’s deep concern about the erosion of faith, individual freedom, and personal conscience in his day. Nevertheless, Lebedev (and Dostoevsky) still insists that “there (is) a thought stronger than all the calamities, crop failures, tortures, plague, leprosy and all that hell, which mankind would not have been able to endure without the thought that binds men together, guides their hearts, and makes fruitful the well springs of life.” 45 The “thought” and “well spring of life,” of course, are faith in God, individual conscience, and free will. Like his author, Lebedev fears that these essential spiritual qualities may be suborned in a Russia undergoing massive social change. “Show me a thought binding present-day mankind together that is half as strong as those in (earlier) centuries. And dare to say, finally, that the well springs of life have not weakened, have not turned ‘muddy’ under the ‘star’ [Wormwood], under the network [of railroads] than snare people. And don’t try to frighten me with your prosperity, your wealth, the rarities of famine and the speed of communications. There is greater wealth but less force; the binding idea is gone; everything has gone soft, everything is over-stewed, everyone is over-stewed!” 46 Lebedev’s speech is partly comical, given his “over-stewed” condition, but Dostoevsky’s critique of the utilitarian ideology is no less serious for that. However, Lebedev’s apocalyptic vision is almost entirely negative in its emphasis on the current dominating power of Wormwood-Satan. That negativity raised a significant challenge to Dostoevsky’s implied apocalyptic sense, as Girard astutely perceived. Given Lebedev’s pessimistic view here, Girard asks the pointed question (as Dostoevsky must have asked himself): “To discover something of Satan’s presence everywhere, is this not to play his game, to collaborate in his work of division—even more effective, perhaps, than if one marched under his flag? Is it possible to believe in the devil without believing in God?47 Dostoevsky would confront this vexing question in his 45. Ibid., 375–76, 379. 46. Ibid., 380 (bracketed words are my additions). 47. Girard, Resurrection from the Underground, 48.

88 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

next two major novels, Demons and The Brothers Karamazov, as Percy would later confront it in Lancelot and The Second Coming.

6 The second of Myshkin’s antithetical doubles, the dying consumptive Ippolit, exemplifies the growing nihilism and drift toward suicide Dostoevsky also saw in the age. As Myshkin proves to be an ineffectual Christ, Ippolit’s planned suicide represents the nihilist’s most extreme reaction to the impotence felt when faced with an indifferent, cruel, and assumingly godless universe. His decision to commit suicide is solidified when he views Holbein’s painting of the dead Jesus. As it did for Rogozhin, the painting confirmed Ippolit’s disbelief and hatred of Myshkin’s presumed Christian faith. To him the painting is a horror that reveals the omnipotent “laws of nature,” which no religious faith or divine grace can overcome. It signifies a dead “Christ without Christ,” that is, without any resurrection of Jesus; it is just a human corpse. Nature appears to Ippolit as “some enormous dumb beast” in the shape of “a huge machine of the most modern construction, that has senselessly seized, crushed and swallowed up, blankly and unfeelingly, a great and precious being.” Ippolit concludes that “a dark, insolent, and senselessly eternal power” governs all life. Reflecting on the painting later, he conjures the image of “some huge and repulsive tarantula,” an “all-powerful being” who “laughed at my indignation.” The image recalls Svidrigalov’s earlier image of the afterlife as a seedy bathhouse full of spiders. Ippolit decides that he cannot submit passively “to the dark power that assumes the shape of a tarantula.”48 Instead, by committing suicide he will protest the humiliation and injustice of his fate as a young consumptive doomed to early death. As he approaches his planned suicide, Ippolit composes a long, selfpitying narrative titled, “A Necessary Explanation: Après Moi le deluge.” 49 Like Myshkin, he is a divided self, a sentimental rationalist who feels alienated from the world, as Girard also pointed out.50 He sees himself as an outcast who possesses a superior intelligence and appreciation of beauty and the value of life far greater than the lowly masses. But unlike Myshkin, his awareness only intensifies his isolation, bitterness, and masochism. He is 48. Dostoevsky, The Idiot, 405, 408, 411. 49. Ibid., 385. 50. Girard, Resurrection from the Underground, 34–36.

 

The Idiot: Christ without Christ 

89

contemptuous of all “those scurrying, boasting, eternally worried, gloomy and anxious people who shuttled around me on the sidewalk.” Despite his arrogance, Ippolit can occasionally, like Raskolnikov, act on generous impulses, as when he returns the lost wallet of a destitute provincial doctor and then helps him secure a new job.51 As a rationalist, Ippolit is a philosophical rebel against what he perceives as the unjust order of creation, a precursor of Kirilov and Ivan Karamazov. A true son of Descartes, all he can be sure of is that he exists; all else is dubious. He can imagine an afterlife and divine providence, but he finds them incomprehensible to his intelligence and therefore unworthy of belief. “We abuse providence too much by ascribing our own notions to it, being vexed that we cannot understand it.” He refuses to accept life on “such derisive conditions” and will kill himself in protest. But he forgets the firing cap and botches the suicide attempt, only to live a few weeks longer and die “in terrible anxiety.” 52 Ippolit’s egocentric “Necessary Explanation” and his fate serve as prologue to Dostoevsky’s more extensive treatment of religious faith, nihilism, and suicide in Demons and The Brothers Karamazov. The youth’s vision of the “implacable laws of nature” as like “a huge machine of the most modern construction” is particularly relevant to Percy. Like Kafka and other modern writers, Dostoevsky imagined those “implacable laws” in terms of modern technology and its increasing control over human lives. As we saw in the Notes, the underground man’s fear of the Crystal Palace expressed Dostoevsky’s fear of the potentially destructive effects of the technological revolution, especially its power to dehumanize people and undermine individual freedom. Later, Percy developed this theme further to show how the broad acceptance of the scientific viewpoint as an all-inclusive ideology was an instrumental force in the restructuring of human consciousness and in alienating the self from itself.

6 As I said earlier, Percy’s recasting of the protagonists, themes, and motifs from The Idiot cut across several of his major works. His claim that young Will Barrett in The Last Gentleman bears “a conscious kinship” with Prince 51. Dostoevsky, The Idiot, 343, 401–3. 52. Ibid., 414–15, 612.

90 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Myshkin is, I argued, more ironic than imitative. Though they are alike in their naivety and in that both have what Percy called good “radar,” that is, a capacity to intuit others’ hidden motives—their differences are as distinctive as their similarities. The social, historical, and philosophical contexts of the two novels are obviously quite different. Myshkin inhabits a world at the beginnings of the growing conflict between traditional Christian values and the emerging forces of secularism and nihilism. Will Barrett’s world is postmodern and “post-Christian,” a culture saturated with scientism and secularism. While both Myshkin and Barrett are romantic searchers, Myshkin is more self-conscious and intellectual than young Will. Both fall in love with attractive young women, but Barrett’s quest for romance evolves into a search for the meaning of his life, conducted through a journey into his family past; Myshkin’s quest is focused on the present and future. Both are alienated castaways who hope to find a place in the world, and both fail—Myshkin tragically, Barrett comically. Unlike Myshkin, young Will is also looking for an authority figure to tell him how to live in the ordinary world and hopefully to marry and settle down with his beloved Kitty Vaught. Myshkin, on the other hand, suffers continued estrangement from the ordinary world, leading to his nervous breakdown. Both the Prince and Barrett suffer partially debilitating afflictions. Percy described Will as an “addled young man” who suffers occasional fugue states and temporal dislocation, an affliction, as I said, that may to some extent echo Myshkin’s epilepsy. The Prince’s affliction is basically physical, while Barrett’s is more psychological; both afflictions intensify their temporary estrangement from the ordinary world. Perhaps more importantly, Percy intended Barrett’s affliction to suggest a more precise and pervasive contemporary affliction, one that reflects the author’s broader view of the twentieth century. Barrett’s “disorientation in time,” he explained, “has more to do with a theory of Professor Eric Voegelin about two senses of time. Voegelin contrasted the unhistorical cyclical time of the Greeks and Orientals with the historic linear time of Israel—historic time emerged when Israel emerged.” 53 In this sense, Barrett’s fugue experiences are a sign of the more pervasive disorientation and “abstractedness” Percy saw in 53. Lawson and Kramer, Conversations with Walker Percy, 12–13.

 

The Idiot: Christ without Christ 

91

postmodern consciousness, a result of the modern mind’s absorption of the objectifying categories of scientism Percy described in “Notes for a Novel about the End of the World.” 54 Comically, young Will even tries to order his life according to rigid “scientific principles” and fails miserably. Percy also claimed that Barrett lives in “the religious mode,” another possible allusion to Prince Myshkin.55 The phrase, of course, recalls Kier­ kegaard’s theory of the esthetic, ethical, and religious stages of life, the religious stage being the life of a “knight of faith.” But Barrett is not a “knight of faith” in the Kierkegaardian sense; he makes no “leap of faith.” His search is not a quest for religious faith or for God in any specific sense. Nor can he in any sense be regarded as a Christ figure. Nevertheless, his quest can be called “religious” in the broadest sense—that is, in his intense desire for the truth about his existential predicament and the meaning of his life. Specifically, his goal, only half-conscious, is to discover his true relationship to his suicide father and perhaps to discover a relationship to an authoritative “God-father,” which he discovers as an older man in The Second Coming. His search involves exploring his family history, especially his father, Ed’s, plan to murder Will and his subsequent suicide, a quest that yields important insights into his predicament. He discovers his father’s despair and, importantly, that his father’s stoic ethic is fatalistic and provides no answer to his own trials. The key to his life, he begins to see, is not to be found in some unrealizable romantic ideal or in fidelity to an outmoded, elitist ethical code inherited from the past, but in the present, the here and now of time and history, in the ordinary, concrete world. He briefly glimpsed this true sense of being, as Percy indicated, in the “extraness” he sees in the oak tree and the iron horse head of the hitching post outside the family home. Barrett sees this sense of being in the “gratuitousness in the bark of the tree.” Percy added, “In terms traditional metaphysics, he has caught a glimpse of the goodness and gratuitousness of created being.” But the intuition he glimpses quickly escapes him.56 Myshkin’s experience in the world is sharply different from that of Will 54. Percy, “Notes for a Novel about the End of the World,” in The Message in the Bottle (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975).112–15. 55. Lawson and Kramer, Conversations with Walker Percy, 13–14. 56. Percy, “Diagnosing the Modern Malaise,” in Signposts in a Strange Land, ed., introduction by Patrick Samway (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 221. See also my

92 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Barrett. Unlike Will, the Prince is presented as having almost no family history to explore. Moreover, from the beginning of The Last Gentleman Barrett’s quest is motivated by his infatuation with and sexual desire for Kitty Vaught, the vacuous “girl of his dreams,” which causes him intense emotional anxiety. He is torn between his natural sexual desire for Kitty and his romantic idealizing of her and the outmoded ethical code he inherited that urges him to “act like a gentleman” with women. In contrast, as we saw, Myshkin the idealist never expresses any sexual desire for either of his “loves,” Nastasya or Aglaya. His inner conflict between the transcendent ideal and his actual, earthly life is never resolved and ends in failure and tragedy. The references in the novel to Myshkin as a “knight of faith,” like Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Pushkin’s sad knight, are ironic, as when the foolish Aglaya tries to apply them to the Prince. Moreover, despite his benign presence, Myshkin’s actions in the world prove ineffective or disastrous. In contrast, Barrett does help others; for example, he comforts the dying Jamie Vaught and helps facilitate the youth’s deathbed baptism. He also deters Sutter Vaught from another suicide attempt, and in the end of the novel, he resolutely sets out to continue his search for meaning, for love, and for a viable place in the world. The theme of the castaway is recast by Percy in several works, especially The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman, and The Second Coming. His portrayal of the predicament of the castaway differs substantially from that of Myshkin, who claimed that religious feeling is superior to reason. In his seminal essay, “The Message in the Bottle,” Percy imagined the predicament of an amnesiac castaway on an island who must figure out how to cope with his strange situation. He must first search for “island news,” knowledge of his immediate world that will help him survive. But island news alone will not answer his fundamental spiritual questions: who am I? What is the purpose of my existence? To answer these questions, the castaway needs “news” from beyond the island—that is, revealed truth that will answer his deepest spiritual needs. For Percy, the castaway needs the “good news” of the Christian gospel, delivered by an authoritative “news-bearer,” an apostle of Christ. discussion of this scene in John F. Desmond, Walker Percy’s Search for Community (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 108–9.

 

The Idiot: Christ without Christ 

93

Though Myshkin and Barrett bear some likeness as castaways, their reactions to their predicament are substantially different. Myshkin is a castaway due to his other-worldly, romantic idealism, his passive response to human sexuality and to evil. Percy’s castaways undertake an active search for meaning in their immediate world. For Percy the Catholic believer, the castaway’s search is conducted through the quotidian world, through the “flesh” of ordinary experience, including sexual desire. In this sense, for Percy all postmodern individuals are castaways, alienated from their true self and true “home” as spiritual/physical beings, as Kierkegaard also affirmed. Myshkin’s argument that religious feeling is the essence of Christianity marks another sharp difference between Dostoevsky and Percy. Percy’s castaways—Will Barrett, Tom More, Binx Bolling, Lance Lamar—search for clues to meaning, often with inchoate faith and hope, through their immediate circumstances and events. Dostoevsky, as Frank argued, saw an unbridgeable gap between faith and reason, as Myshkin also claimed. Whereas Dostoevsky staked religious faith on the subjective experience manifested in the Russian peasantry, Percy argued in “The Message in the Bottle” that a reconciliation between faith and reason (between Aquinas and Kierkegaard) is possible, based on Aquinas’s distinction between “scientific knowledge” and “knowledge of faith.” Under the latter, “scientific knowledge” achieved by reason and the knowledge of faith are conformed so that “assent is undertaken simultaneously.” 57 For Percy, this synthesis is expressed in the castaway’s search for meaning and the “good news” of Revelation available to him, as the older Will Barrett discovers in The Second Coming. It can be tested and affirmed existentially to verify truths beyond the categories of “scientific knowledge” or “reason” alone. Such a synthesis avoids Kierkegaard’s antinomy between faith and reason, subjective and objective, and the fissure between the ethical and religious modes of existence. For Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, religious belief requires a nonrational “leap of faith,” a view Percy the Catholic found “unreasonable” when he argued for the larger epistemology of Aquinas. Percy well understood the difficulty of attaining such “rational faith” in 57. Percy, “Message in the Bottle,” 145 (my emphasis).

94 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

postmodern culture, and he found in Kierkegaard a clue to the modern rupture between the ethical and the religious. Therefore, he would have found Myshkin’s predicament insightful in this regard in the way that Dostoevsky ironically presented his pseudo-Christ. Myshkin’s fractured character, as I have argued, leads the ethically “good,” idealistic prince to act unreasonably and pityingly toward Nastasya and Aglaya, especially Nastasya. In depicting his failure with both women, Dostoevsky anticipated the crippling Cartesian dualism and disjunction between the religious and the ethical and its disastrous effects that Percy found so pervasive in twentiethcentury culture and diagnosed so brilliantly in his works.

 

The Idiot: Christ without Christ 

95

Demons: A C autionary Tale Chap ter 5 Demons A Cautionary Tale

By all accounts, Demons (1872) is Dostoevsky’s most political novel, a frontal attack on the intellectual and moral decadence he saw infecting much of educated Russian society in the 1860s. His broad attack is developed on two fronts. One is his attack on the progressive liberals and their descendants, the philosophical nihilists bent on fomenting revolution in the name of a new social order. Writing to Strakov, Dostoevsky said, “The nihilists and Westerners need a decisive lashing. With them you have to write with a whip in your hand.” 1 These would-be revolutionaries are the literal and symbolic offspring of the socialists and atheists of the 1840s who had imbibed the ideology of Western liberalism and individualism, personified in the novel by Stefan Trofimovich. To Dostoevsky, such men were at heart nihilists who had abandoned their roots in the Russian soil and the Orthodox faith in favor of becoming “universal men” who live by autonomous reason and will power alone. As Dostoevsky told his brother Maikov, “Take note, my dear friend: whoever loses his people and his nationality loses also his native faith and God; there you have the theme of my novel.” 2 This theme is centered mainly on Dostoevsky’s enigmatic protagonist, Nicoli Stavrogin. The second focus of his attack is the group of pretentious, bored, disso1. William J. Leatherbarrow, ed., Dostoevsky’s “The Devils”: A Critical Companion (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 25–26. 2. Ibid., 23.

96 

lute “fools” who inhabit the provincial town of Skvoreskniki, depicted as a microcosm of Russian middle- and upper-class bourgeois society of the time. Both groups—nihilists and fools—are possessed by demons. Dostoevsky made clear that he intended the title to refer to almost all the characters in the novel, not just the nihilist revolutionaries. The two targets of his attack converge near the end of the novel in a general eruption of chaos in the town—rioting, murder, rape, arson, and suicide. Demons is Dostoevsky’s most pessimistic novel, a work whose central themes and motifs, as we shall see, are developed further in Percy’s writings, especially his works written in the 1970s and 1980s. In a 1988 interview with Phil McCombs, Percy said that his last novel, The Thanatos Syndrome (1987), was his most political novel.3 In that novel, Percy attacked the “progressive” liberal-nihilist physicians at the governmentfunded complex Fedville who are engaged in the pharmacological doping of citizens throughout the fictional Feliciana parish. These “qualitarian” physicians, Drs. John Van Dorn and Bob Comeau, are heirs and exponents of the Western liberal atheist tradition that Dostoevsky attacked. Through his protagonist Dr. Tom More, Percy specifically targeted the Blue Boy doping project run by Dr. Van Dorn, a project that stands as a symbol of the technological manipulation of human personality promoted by liberal-progressives with utopian goals. The project, pursued in the name of greater human self-fulfillment, in fact pacifies victims, suppresses conscience and free will, releases sexual inhibitions, and induces flagrant sexual behavior. Fedville is an updated medical-technological version of Dostoevsky’s Crystal Palace. It threatens to destroy the human self and instead produce automatons enslaved to drugs. As we see later, in The Thanatos Syndrome Percy expanded his attack on these modern-day nihilists by linking them historically to the medical experiments performed by Weimar physicians in 1930s Germany, prelude to the Nazi program of mass murder of “undesirables” during the Third Reich. Through Tom More, Percy also exposes the sexual perversity of the “qualitarian” doctors, their secret doping, rape, and pornographic videotaping of adolescents at Van Dorn’s academy, Belle Ame. Percy’s correlation of these themes—nihilism, dehumanization, abuse 3. Lewis A. Lawson and Victor A. Kramer, eds., More Conversations with Walker Percy (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993), 197–98.

Demons: A Cautionary Tale 

97

of science and technology, sexual perversion, and euthanasia—tied to the historical precedent of the Holocaust, focused his persistent warning about the threatened “loss of self” in a society increasingly possessed by demonic impulses and a collective death wish or “thanatos syndrome.” Like Dostoevsky, he saw this dire situation as deeply linked to the collapse of belief in the Christian gospel and the emergence of the self-willed, autonomous individual in society. He called The Thanatos Syndrome a “cautionary tale,” which like Demons offers a prophetic warning about a potential spiritual catastrophe for a culture increasingly ruled by demonic forces and embarked on a path toward self-destruction. To my knowledge, Percy never stated explicitly that any of his novels were directly indebted to Demons. He did, however, refer to nihilist-suicide Kirilov and to Ivan Karamazov in several interviews and emphasized the moral and social implications of the nihilists’ ideology. But the impact of Demons, especially the predicament of Stavrogin, is registered broadly across Percy’s writings. Stavrogin’s predicament—that of being a “non-self” or a self “evacuated” of real identity—foreshadows a similar predicament examined in several of Percy’s works. As I have pointed out, he refers specifically to this predicament in his important essays “The Loss of the Creature” and “Diagnosing the Modern Malaise.” We also find it represented in several characters who can be seen as descendants of Stavrogin—Dr. Sutter Vaught, Lance Lamar, the “demoniac self” figure, and the Nobel Laureate scientist described in Lost in the Cosmos, and the unwitting victims of Van Dorn’s doping scheme in The Thanatos Syndrome.4 Significantly, Stavrogin turns to violence and sex (and finally suicide) to escape the “emptiness” of his true being. Percy advanced Dostoevsky’s analysis of Stavrogin’s predicament by showing its far-reaching manifestations in the twentieth century. In addition, Dostoevsky’s social satire against the possessed “fools” in Skvoreskniki is echoed in Percy’s satire against similar social types who are dedicated to frivolous diversions in all his novels.

6 4. Walker Percy, “Diagnosing the Modern Malaise,” in Signposts in a Strange Land, ed., introduction by Patrick Samway (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 204–22, and “The Loss of the Creature,” in Message in the Bottle (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), 46–64.

98 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

The key to understanding the philosophical and moral significance of Demons as a sign of the times is to be found in Dostoevsky’s portrayal of Stavrogin, the paradoxical figure whose presence dominates the novel. At first glance it is tempting to regard him simply as a diabolical villain—an amoral rapist and murderer who is directly and indirectly responsible for the brutal death of many others. But such a reading is clearly oversimplified. Stavrogin’s destructive behavior is the result of his despair over the spiritual predicament he can neither resolve nor escape and that leads to his eventual suicide. Stavrogin is fully aware of his predicament, which doubly compounds his anguish. Examining the roots of that predicament helps us to see him as a tragic figure and not simply a villain. As we know, Percy agreed with Kierkegaard that the self can only know itself transparently under God and that the goal of the self is to become an authentic human being. Dostoevsky would have concurred, as his writings also confirm. Stavrogin’s predicament, as many critics have noted, is that he is a “nonself” who never discovers an authentic sense of being. As a result, he capitulates to others and to the inner demonic forces that possess him and gradually drive him to suicide. The roots of Stavrogin’s predicament are in his past, especially his childhood upbringing. Virtually abandoned by his parents, from a young age he imbibed the rationalist ideas of Western liberalism under the tutelage of Stefan Trofimovich, one of the “intellectuals” of the 1840s who had already abandoned faith in Orthodox Christianity. Trofimovich is a weak, unstable person whose character has been shaped by an inchoate romantic idealism that he infuses in his young protégé. As Frank pointed out, Trofimovich instilled in Stavrogin “a first, vague sensation of that sacred longing for an indeterminate absolute, a longing able to be fulfilled by superior souls.” 5 But the longing is undermined by his mentor’s feckless, weak-willed personality. His ideas ring hollow to the young, highly intelligent Stavrogin, who having already rejected Orthodox belief, also rejects the romantic idealism and liberalism preached by Trofimovich. Where does this leave Stavrogin? He is left rootless and disillusioned and feels a hollowness at the core of his being. But paradoxically, he still longs for some set of moral principles to live by. The same is true of Dr. Sutter Vaught and Lance Lamar. 5. Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time, ed. Mary Petrusewicz (Princeton, N.J., and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), 654–57.

Demons: A Cautionary Tale 

99

Stavrogin’s longing is genuine, but it lacks any ontological, philosophical, or moral foundation. Consequently, the power of his personality becomes concentrated in his autonomous will. As Percy argued in “Diagnosing the Modern Malaise,” after the collapse of Christendom and the apparent failure of alternative ideologies, the self turns to its own radical autonomy to establish an identity, often with destructive force.6 In Stavrogin’s case, manipulation of and violence against others becomes his “amusing” diversion from the boredom and pain of his emptiness. He provokes murderous duels and insults and assaults dignitaries and their wives, seduces his disciple Shatov’s wife, conducts numerous affairs, coldly rapes the adolescent Matyrosha, who commits suicide, and marries the half-witted Marya Lebyadkin on a bet after a drunken party. These rebellious acts reveal Stavrogin’s attempts to assert a self through violence and sex, similar in many respects to the later Sutter Vaught and Lance Lamar. All three characters represent what Percy later came to define in Lost in the Cosmos as “the demoniac self.” 7 Like Percy’s “possessed” characters, Stavrogin exercises a rigid selfcontrol and perverse intellectual detachment from his violent actions, a mask to hide the deep fissure in his personality, hidden except for his obvious contempt for a society he loathes and derides. But neither his imperious self-will nor his violence fills the void in his soul. Dostoevsky pinpointed Stavrogin’s emptiness in his notebook for Demons. He is “a man who is becoming bored. A product of the age in Russia. He acts haughtily and is capable of relying only on himself, i.e. turning away from the gentry, the Westernizers, the nihilists (but the question remains for him: what in effect is he? For him the answer is: nothing).” 8 Nevertheless, Stavrogin is not alone in his boredom. Most of the possessed citizens of Skvoreskniki are also bored, indulging in the aimless diversions of gossiping, backbiting, and scheming against one another. At the same time, it is important to recognize that Stavrogin, like Sutter Vaught and Lance Lamar, possesses a residue of moral conscience that causes him to agonize inwardly over his predicament. To Lisa Tushin he 6. Percy, “Diagnosing the Modern Malaise,” 208–12. 7. Percy, Lost in the Cosmos, 175–89. 8. Leatherbarrow, Dostoevsky’s “The Devils”, 14.

100 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

admits his responsibility for the murder of his wife, Marfa, and her brother, Lebyadkin.9 In his final letter to the faithful, loving Darya, Stavrogin says, “In my conscience I am guilty of my wife’s death” and “I am also guilty before Lisa Nikolaevna” (Tushin), who after a scandalous night alone with Stavrogin is trampled to death by an angry mob.10 He also tells Darya that he finds his evil actions both despicable and enjoyable. His friend and disciple Kirilov astutely describes him as “a man looking for a burden”; that is, for some cause or belief to give his allegiance to.11 Yet when Bishop Tikhon offers him such a “burden,” to repent and submit himself to a spiritual mentor, Stavrogin vehemently rejects it. Sunk in despair, he lacks any hope or will to believe. As Frank argues, lacking a core identity, Stavrogin “allows himself to become the tool of others’ fantasies” and expectations.12

6 Stavrogin’s tragedy can be traced through his relationship with his principal disciples—Kirilov, Shatov, and Pyotr Verkovensky, son of Stefan Trofimovich. To them Stavrogin becomes an “idol,” an ironic “god for others” or negative messiah. When Stavrogin thinks seriously of committing suicide (Percy’s Sutter Vaught does attempt suicide), he is convinced that even suicide would be a meaningless gesture. In contrast, his friend Kirilov carries the philosophical argument for suicide to its “logical,” insane end. A thinker who has studied the growing number of suicides in Russia, Kirilov “rejects morality outright” and affirms “the principle of universal destruction for the sake of good final goals.” 13 In his philosophical musings Kirilov focused on why more people don’t commit suicide, and concludes that people reject suicide because of “two prejudices”: fear of pain and fear “of the other world.” 14 To him neither fear “makes any difference,” but men shy away from recognizing this truth. Kirilov claims that “there will be entire freedom when it makes no difference whether one lives or does not live.” When the narrator protests that man fears death because he loves life, Kirilov 9. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, introduction Joseph Frank (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), 532. 10. Ibid., 674. 11. Ibid., 290. 12. Ibid., 652. 13. Ibid., 94. 14. Ibid., 114.

Demons: A Cautionary Tale 

101

rejects the notion as a gross deceit. Deluded men now accept a life of pain, fear, and misery, he argues, because they love pain and fear. “Man now is not yet the right man.” But once the deceit is recognized, he claims “there will be a new man, happy and proud. He for whom it makes no difference whether he lives or does not live, will be the new man. He who overcomes pain and fear will be God.” The goal of Kirilov’s perverse quest is to become the “new man” through suicide. “Whoever wants the main freedom must dare to kill himself. There is no further freedom.” 15 Since for nihilist Kirilov nothing “makes any difference,” suicide is the logical conclusion to his thought. Listening to him, the narrator concludes, “he’s crazy, of course.” 16 Stavrogin has exercised a powerful and “poisonous” influence on Kirilov’s nihilistic thinking, but he cannot follow his disciple’s “logical” path to suicide. Although like Kirilov he also believes that nothing finally “makes any difference,” Stavrogin is still searching for some coherent identity and meaning for his life. When he does finally commit suicide, it is not from a deduced philosophical argument like that of Kirilov, but from pride and despair. He tells Kirilov that he can “understand shooting oneself,” but as soon as he considers suicide his consciousness interposes “new thoughts.” He imagines that even if he committed some outrage that people would remember and spit upon for a thousand years, it would still amount to nothing. The strain of moral conscience still haunts him, as we see in his final letter to Darya. For his part, Kirilov, in a parody of the Apocalypse (and of Myshkin’s epileptic auras), happily proclaims to have reached the point of an “eternal present” when time shall be no more. He has attained a kind of Gnostic transcendent vision and proclaims that everything is “good,” even if someone starves to death or if a girl is raped. In a parody of Christ’s second coming, Kirilov proclaims that “he who teaches all is good will come— and his name is the man-god”,that is, the autonomous self.17 Dostoevsky clearly fashioned Kirilov as a mock Christ who claims he will redeem mankind by his “sacrifice” from the “deceit” of belief in God and immortality. As Rowan Williams and Rene Girard have argued, Kirilov is a caricature of Christ who sees in himself the union of human and 15. Ibid., 115. 16. Ibid., 117. 17. Ibid., 238.

102 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

divine nature.18 To Kirilov, Christ died on the cross as a victim of nature and was not resurrected. To him, belief in Christ as God is an absurdity. But someone must be the first to proclaim the man-god through an affirmation of self-will. “If there is a God,” he tells Pyotr, “then the will is all his, and I cannot get out of his will. If not, the will is all mine, and it is my duty to proclaim self-will. The fullest point of my self-will is to kill myself. I will begin, and end, and open the door. I have found the attribute of my divinity, by which I can show in the main point my insubordination and my new fearsome freedom.” 19 This is the “logical” solipsistic end of atheistic liberalism’s radical individualism. Kirilov does not mind in the least that he will be blamed for Shatov’s murder and only awaits Pyotr’s cue to commit suicide and accept being condemned as an infamous murderer. Kirilov’s philosophical argument and his suicide have direct bearing on Percy’s thought. He once described Kirilov as an “honest” suicide, perhaps thinking of Camus’s portrait of Kirilov in his discussion of suicide in The Myth of Sisyphus. There is nothing as explicit as Kirilov’s philosophical argument for suicide in Percy’s fiction, though a similar intellectual challenge is dramatized in Will Barrett’s colloquy with the inner voice of his dead father in The Second Coming. For Percy, an “honest” suicide is a self-conscious individual who has seriously considered suicide and then chosen to kill himself. Percy distinguished such an individual from those he called “nonsuicides,” the lotus-eaters who are neither “hot nor cold” and never seriously consider suicide, such as the citizens of Skvoreskniki. Percy’s third type is the “ex-suicide,” the one who seriously considers suicide and finally rejects it, like Dmitri Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov, Kate Cutrer in The Moviegoer, and the mature Will Barrett in The Second Coming.

6 Having rejected Kirilov’s argument for suicide because he believes killing himself would be an empty gesture, Stavrogin also rejects Shatov’s attempt to persuade him to lead a new religious movement. Their strained relationship comes to a head shortly after Shatov returns from America. Shatov 18. Rene Girard, Resurrection from the Underground, ed., trans. James G. Williams (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012), 39–41, 50, and Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2008), 23, 90–91, 99–100. 19. Dostoevsky, Demons, 619.

Demons: A Cautionary Tale 

103

reminds Stavrogin that two years earlier he had convinced him that Russia is the only “God-bearing nation” on earth and that its role is to “renew and save the world in the name of a new God.” Stavrogin’s words planted the seed of God and the motherland in Shatov’s heart.20 Although Stavrogin insists that he was “not joking” when he spoke those words, he admits that he was at the same time “pouring poison” into Kirilov’s heart. The obvious contradiction in Stavrogin’s words reveals his deceit and disbelief in any set of principles. As he soon tells Kirilov, “I know I’m a worthless character, but I’m not trying to get in with the strong ones.” 21 Paradoxically, this reveals that there is a measure of honesty in his admission that qualifies his claim to being totally worthless. The lengthy exchange between Shatov and Stavrogin afforded Dostoevsky the opportunity to rehearse some of his favorite themes, the kind of explicit philosophizing that Percy would for the most part eschew in his fiction. In addition to claiming Russia as the “only God-bearing” nation, Shatov voices Dostoevsky’s familiar attack on the Roman Catholic Church as a temporal power, as an “anti-Christ” that destroyed genuine Christianity in the West.22 Shatov-Dostoevsky reminds Stavrogin that he claimed that if truth be proven to be “outside Christ,” it is better to stick with Christ; that socialism is essentially atheism; that nations are driven by a death-defying “spirit of life” and search for God, not by reason and science; that reason alone is unable to define good and evil; that science can only finally offer “the solution of the fist”; and that “half-science” (scientism) is a “despot” and a “scourge of mankind worse than death.” 23 The point of this lengthy exchange in terms of understanding Stavrogin’s predicament is that he has already thought through these various arguments from both Shatov the believer and Kirilov the nihilist and found no satisfactory answers in them to his existential predicament—that is, the abysmal void in his heart. He is, as Percy would later say of the postmodern autonomous thinker, “a castaway of sorts, but who is actually aware of his predicament, which doubly alienates him.” 24 Consequently, he adamantly 20. Ibid., 247. 21. Ibid., 290. 22. Ibid., 249. 23. Ibid., 249–51. 24. Percy, “Diagnosing the Modern Malaise,” 217.

104 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

refuses Shatov’s plea to “raise the banner” for a new “coming to God” in Russia, just as he will also refuse Pyotr’s plea for him to “raise the banner” for a new godless society in Russia. Stavrogin refuses to be anyone’s “idol”; he stands alone in pride and self-will, driven by an evil spirit of perversity he cannot resist. As Shatov astutely observes, since Stavrogin admits no difference between good and evil, he married the crippled Marya “out of a passion for torture, out of moral sensuality.” Shatov’s charge, repeated later by the monk Tikhon, pinpoints the masochistic egotism of Stavrogin’s rebellious behavior. Shatov urges him to “kiss the earth, flood it with his tears, ask forgiveness” and take up “peasant labor” in hope of finding God.25 But Stavrogin dismisses Shatov as nothing but “a psychologist,” just as he will later dismiss Tikhon.

6 Pyotr Verkhovensky is the most diabolical of Stavrogin’s disciples, a cold nihilist who practices and promotes evil for its own sake and for power. He tries to flatter Stavrogin, saying, “You are my idol. You are precisely what’s needed. You are a leader, you are a sun, and I am your worm.” 26 Frustrated in his plan to convince Stavrogin to lead a social revolution, Pyotr deceives a band of stupid, would-be revolutionaries—Erkel, Lyamshin, Virginsky, Shigalov, and others—by convincing them that he represents a vast network of revolutionaries across Russia, with ties to the Internationale. Like Satan, Pyotr is a “father of lies” who works in the shadows by deceit and flattery, meanwhile plotting general chaos in Skvoreskniki and the murder of Shatov, whom he hates. He completely dupes Julia von Lempke, wife of the governor and social rival of the aristocratic Varvara Stavrogina, Stavrogin’s mother. He persuades Julia to sponsor a grand “literary” fete, which turns into a riotous melee when the “scum” of the town crash the event. Behind the scenes, Pyotr orchestrates the murder of Shatov, claiming he was a traitor to the revolutionary cause, connives to have Stavrogin’s wife, Marya, and her brother, Lebyadkin, murdered by the convict Fetya, arranges a scandalous liaison between the engaged Lisa Tushin and Stavrogin, and incites the arson and general riot in the town, during which Lisa is beaten to death by the angry mob. Like one of Satan’s minions, Pyotr escapes capture and 25. Dostoevsky, Demons, 254, 255. 26. Ibid., 419.

Demons: A Cautionary Tale 

105

flees abroad, ready to sow chaos elsewhere. He represents a purely diabolical principle in the world, the consummate nihilist dedicated to promoting evil. Dostoevsky’s portrayal of Julia von Lempke’s literary fete and the riot and arson that ensue is a brilliant satiric attack on a society rapidly losing its moral center of gravity. Skvoreskniki’s genteel citizens are mainly bored, aimless, and mean-spirited people whose days are filled with gossiping, back-biting, petty scandals, drinking, and frivolous pranks. One citizen remarks that “everything has become so boring that there is no need to be punctilious about entertainment, as long as it is diverting.” 27 Thus when an itinerant Bible salesman appears in town, the rogue Lyamshin and some idle seminarians slip pornographic pictures into her books, for which she is put in lock-up, to the amusement of all.28 In one episode Lisa and a group of citizens rush to the scene of a young man’s suicide, eager to see the still-warm corpse.29 At another point, a religious icon is stolen and replaced with a mouse; later, out of boredom Lisa and her entourage visit a quack guru who dispenses no wisdom.30 These gullible fools and knaves are unwitting nihilists possessed by demons as much as the would-be revolutionaries. Pyotr shrewdly recognizes their vanities, and, with his lies and nefarious plotting, he exploits them at every turn. There is no comparable character to the vicious devil Pyotr in Percy’s fiction, except perhaps the comic-demonic Art Immelman in Love in the Ruins. But this is not to say that the demonic principle of evil is not equally at work in Percy’s postmodern society. Pyotr would have been easily recognized as an agent of evil by Dostoevsky’s literate audience. But in Percy’s fictional postmodern world, the reality of demons as a spiritual power in the world has become diluted to the point that most of his characters, and much of his audience, have difficulty recognizing such demonic presences. Their minds are too absorbed with the idols of scientism, consumerism, and pleasure-seeking diversions. Lance Lamar, for example, cannot see the demon of evil in his own character. Likewise, an older Will Barrett only slowly and painfully comes to recognize the “father of lies” in his father, lawyer 27. Ibid., 326. 28. Ibid., 321–22. 29. Ibid., 326. 30. Ibid., 324, 333.

106 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Barrett. In The Thanatos Syndrome, Tom More has difficulty grasping the dire implications of the Blue Boy plot until instructed by Father Smith. Percy’s audience seemed mostly to have lost or was losing the kind of religious and moral sensitivity that Dostoevsky could still depend on the audience to see in 1860s and 1870s. In his day, Percy had to develop more subtle and indirect ways of representing evil in his fiction.

6 Stavrogin’s note to the beloved Darya, written just before he commits suicide, reveals him clearly as a tragic figure, neither moral monster nor pathological masochist. As I have argued, his tragedy is doubly intensified by his acute self-consciousness. In the note, Stavrogin confesses to Darya that he has “tested his strength” everywhere, “for myself and for show,” but has found nothing to which he can honestly commit his will power.31 He claims that he found himself “capable of wishing to do a good act” but also that “I wish for evil and find pleasure in it.” Yet he discovers that even those desires are “too shallow.” He admits that his life of debauchery has exhausted his strength; that he didn’t even like debauchery and “did not want it.” Ironically, he partly envies nihilists like Pyotr for their “hopes” and commitment to a cause, but he could never join them because he “has the habits of a decent man” and is contemptuous of their stupid, vulgar behavior. Radically isolated, he both wants Darya’s love and rejects it because his own would be “too shallow.” Having examined all forms of belief and unbelief and possible commitment, Stavrogin admits that “one can argue endlessly about everything, but what poured out of me was only negation, with no magnanimity and no force. Or not even negation. Everything is always shallow and listless.” 32 Even committing suicide like the mad Kirilov, he says, would be a gross self-deception, a “play at magnanimity.” The meaning of Stavrogin’s confession to Darya is profoundly ambiguous. On the one hand, it seems to reveal an acute moral conscience, a sincere admission of his failure to find a genuine self, of his hollowness and the collapse of his self-will. But on the other hand, his note may also be seen as the egoistic confession of a proud, gifted man who, like Raskolnikov, is disgusted with himself for not having achieved some “magnanimous” des31. Ibid, 675 (my emphasis). 32. Ibid., 676.

Demons: A Cautionary Tale 

107

tiny in life, and whose only commitment has been to “nothing.” Both interpretations help reveal the depth of conflict in Stavrogin’s soul, and since he cannot find a way to resolve or escape his predicament, he ascends to the attic and hangs himself. His suicide is carefully prepared. “Everything indicated premeditation and consciousness to the last minute,” so that the autopsy “completely and emphatically ruled out insanity.” 33 Stavrogin’s case, for Dostoevsky, represented the tragic consequences of self-will and radical autonomous individualism.

6 The ambiguity of Stavrogin’s note to Darya, its mixture of sincerity and egoistic posturing, points back to the controversial chapter of Stavrogin’s visit to Bishop Tikhon, now published as an epilogue to the novel. As is well known, the chapter, which is not in fact an epilogue, was originally planned as chapter 9 of part 2 of the novel, to be placed after Stavrogin rejects Pyotr’s call for him to lead the band of revolutionaries. The chapter was rejected by the censors in 1872, apparently because of Stavrogin’s brutal description of his seduction of the adolescent Matryosha and her subsequent suicide. Dostoevsky submitted a revised version that was also rejected, and then he abandoned any further effort to have it included. Years later, after his death, the chapter was added as the epilogue. (The epilogue, of course, is a literary convention favored by both Dostoevsky and Percy. Except for The Last Gentleman, all of Percy’s novels end with epilogues of one sort or another. Lance Lamar’s entire monologue can be read as an extended epilogue to the tragic events at Belle Isle.) Critics continue to debate the significance of the “epilogue” to Demons. Michael Holquist and Edward Wasiolek have argued that Dostoevsky’s decision not to try to reinstate the chapter before his death was a prudent choice because it leaves Stavrogin as an enigmatic figure whose vacuous identity is shaped by others’ idolatrous perceptions of him. To these critics, Stavrogin’s revelations in the epilogue are aesthetically inappropriate. Wasiolek concludes that “the portrait of Stavrogin in the confession chapter is morally consistent, but dramatically inconsistent.” 34 But other critics like 33. Ibid., 678. 34. Edward Wasiolek, Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1964), 132. See also Williams, Dostoevsky, 101, 256.

108 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Joseph Frank and Rowan Williams believe the epilogue is essential to understanding Dostoevsky’s total philosophical, political, and spiritual vision, conveyed through Stavrogin’s role in the novel.35 Frank, as I noted earlier, interprets him as a man with a tortured conscience who is searching, albeit unsuccessfully, for some moral framework. Regarding this critical debate, it is important to recall where Dostoevsky originally intended it to appear (chapter 9, book 2), because it provides crucial insight into the despair that leads Stavrogin to commit suicide. That is, Dostoevsky’s plan was to have Stavrogin’s visit to Tikhon appear immediately after his return to Skvoreskniki from abroad, after his years of debauchery and violence in Petersburg, after his rape of Matyrosha and her suicide, his secret marriage to the crippled Marya, his earlier liaison with Lisa Tushon, and his political intrigue with Shatov and Pyotr in Petersburg. At the time of his return to Skvoreskniki he is already being haunted by nightmares of the dead Matyrosha and, he fears, real or imaginary demons. One of his motives for visiting Tikhon, he hopes, is to exorcise those nightmares. Still to come in the planned order of the chapters are Pyotr’s plotting of murder and riot in the provincial town, Shatov’s murder and the murders of Marya and her brother, the riot in the town and Lisa’s murder by the angry mob, and Stavrogin’s final letter to Darya. Stavrogin is of course complicit in all these disasters, especially because of his passivity. But as the intended order of the chapters reveals, Stavrogin’s despair leads him to Tikhon in hope of finding some way to escape his solipsistic intellect and the vicious cycle of violence he is trapped in. In his conversation with Tikhon, Stravrogin describes the terrible nightmares he has suffered since the rape-suicide of Matryrosha, like Svidrigalov’s nightmares before his suicide in Crime and Punishment. In the nightmares Stavrogin sees a vision of a kind of earthly paradise, a vision inspired by his viewing of Claude Lorraine’s painting of Acis and Galatia, which to him represents a “Golden Age.” But in his dream the pastoral scene morphs into a horrid image of a red spider and a wasted Matyrosha shaking her fist at him.36 Frank argues that the recurrent nightmares reveal the guilty conscience that drives Stavrogin to visit the monk, confess 35. Williams, Dostoevsky, 101–7. 36. Dostoevsky, Demons, 702–4.

Demons: A Cautionary Tale 

109

his sins, and hopefully expiate his past.37 We recall that Shatov earlier had accused him of “moral sensuality” and advised him to seek help from Tilhon.38 But the question of Stavrogin’s motives for his visit to the monk is complicated by the fact that his main confession is a written document he plans to publish widely, perhaps as another ego-driven assault on respectable society. Before he presents the written confession to Tikhon, Stavrogin challenges the monk about his faith in God. Unsure of whether he is being tormented by a demon, Stavrogin asks whether it is possible to believe in demons without believing in God. Tikhon answers “yes” and explains that “a complete atheist stands on the next-to-last upper step to the most complete faith, while the indifferent one has no faith, apart from a bad fear,” a statement that echoes Kierkegaard’s belief about a person in despair.39 The monk’s reply reminds Stavrogin of the warning to the Laodiceans in the book of Revelation that those who are “lukewarm” in their faith, neither “hot nor cold” but merely “indifferent,” will be condemned. But when Tikhon starts to recite the scriptural passage, Stavrogin angrily cuts him short: “Enough. It’s for the indifferent ones, right? You know, I love you very much.” “And I you,” Tikhon replies.40 After a long silence, Stavrogin claims that he expressed his love for the monk “almost in a fit, at least unexpectedly” angry at himself for having said the words. For once, Stavrogin has lost rigid control of his feelings. Stavrogin’s reaction exposes his torturous inner conflict. He is torn between love and hate; he is both “hot and cold,” not one of the “indifferent ones,” despite his mask of indifference and his claims that “nothing matters.” He alternatively loves, perhaps envies, and hates Tikhon’s honest, humble admission that he is a sinner with faith in Christ (“Let me not be ashamed of Thy cross, O Lord”). Tikhon’s humility and faith speak directly to Stavrogin’s tortured heart. But almost immediately, he rejects Tikhon’s offer of mutual love, as he later rejects Darya’s love and offer of help. He denounces the monk as a “psychologist” trying to pry into his soul. “I don’t 37. Ibid., 661–62. 38. Ibid., 254–56. 39. Ibid., 688. 40. Ibid., 689.

110 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

invite anyone into my soul, I don’t need anyone, I’m able to manage for myself.” 41 Stavrogin’s written confession and his desire to publish it raise complicated questions about his state of mind. In the confession, Stavrogin describes the boundless “pleasure” he experienced from committing shameful acts (theft, rape, murder). His pleasure is not simply emotional; like the underground man, “he liked the intoxication from the tormenting awareness of (his) baseness.” 42 His ecstatic mental pleasure is doubled by his ability to restrain his emotions—spite, anger, hatefulness—during the despicable acts by sheer will power. Stavrogin claims that his feelings in threatening situations were strong, but that they “never subjected the whole of me, but there was full consciousness (and it was all based on consciousness!).” He admits that, like Rousseau, he masturbated as a youth, but that he stopped “the moment I decided to. I am always master of myself when I want to be.” 43 Consciousness and will power triumph over ordinary erotic passion in him, so much so that Stavrogin boasts that he could “live like a monk,” despite his strongly sensuous nature. Stavrogin’s confession of the kind of mental ecstasy he experiences from committing heinous acts reveals the radical split in his character. On one level his claim to be able to “live like a monk” suggests a perverted stoic asceticism, one not in the service of God or love of others, but only in service of his autonomous mind and will. His control of eros is directed toward power, not love. As the same time, it suggests a masochistic impulse to “suffer,” perhaps out of self-hatred and contempt for life, or perhaps as Kirilov described him, as a man who is searching for a “burden” to give meaning to his life. On another level, it also suggests that his perverse behavior may be an escape from the boredom of ordinary life, a diversion like that of many of the Skvoreskniki citizens he despises. But perhaps most important in the confession is Dostoevsky’s linking of Stavrogin’s self-consciousness and detachment to the erotic impulse and to sexual perversity. His development of this theme directly anticipates Percy’s analysis of the sexual malaise in the “autonomous” postmodern self—that is, the radical division 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 693 (my emphasis). 43. Ibid.

Demons: A Cautionary Tale 

111

between “objective” self-consciousness and sexual perversity exemplified by Sutter Vaught, Lance Lamar, and the prototypical demoniac self in Lost in the Cosmos. In his insightful discussion of Stavrogin, Rowan Williams has explicated the intimate connection between self-consciousness, violence, perverse erotic pleasure, and demonism in Stavrogin’s confession.44 Stavrogin suffers from a radical disjunction of mind and will on the one hand and erotic passion on the other. In him, consciousness controls passion so that the pleasure gained is intellectual, not sensual in the ordinary sense. Feeling is abstracted into idea; isolated autonomy rules over shared emotional commitment. The roots of this disjunction, as both Dostoevsky and Percy recognized, can be traced to the Cartesian dualism that helped undermine the integral self. As an adult, Stavrogin became a “non-self,” a man without a clear identity, gradually possessed by demonic impulses. The “unbelievable pleasure” in vicious behavior he experienced is a consequence of that demonic possession. Even while raping Matyrosha he is detached enough to record (and later write about) her mood, as well as his contempt for her subsequent grief. (Lance Lamar exercises a similar detachment during his sexual intercourse with the actress Raine Robinette.) After the rape, and without speaking to the distraught girl, Stavrogin cannot resist imagining what has happened when she disappeared, though he suspects the “probability” of her suicide. He plots how he will look through a crack in the shed she ran to, a detail he takes pains to include in his confession “to prove with certainty to what degree of clarity I was in possession of my mental faculties.” When after a time he looks through the crack and sees the hanged girl, he remarks, “At last I made out what I needed . . . I wanted to be totally sure.” 45 Here he acts as a pornographic voyeur, as does Lance Lamar when he videotapes his wife’s infidelity so that he can see and be “absolutely sure,” even though he already has scientific proof of her infidelity. Stavrogin’s voyeurism puts him in the same class as Lisa Tushin and her entourage when they rush to see the corpse of the young man who committed suicide. Both Dostoevsky and Percy understood the voyeuristic sexual impulse as a search for a vicariously experienced “ecstatic” moment, a di44. Williams, Dostoevsky, 97–112. 45. Dostoevsky, Demons, 700.

112 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

version from boredom, and a way to temporarily escape the “nothingness” of their existence. Stavrogin thinks briefly of committing suicide after Matyrosha’s death, but then casually turns to another diversion. “Something better turned up,” he says. He marries the crippled Marya because “the thought of Stavrogin marrying such a lost being tickled my nerves. Nothing uglier could be imagined.” 46 Stavrogin’s deeper motives in writing the confession and wanting to publish it come to light after Tikhon finishes reading the document. He has ostensibly come to the monk to seek forgiveness and get rid of the nightmares of the raped Matyrosha that continue to haunt him. “If you were to forgive me, it would be much easier for me,” he tells Tikhon. The monk acknowledges that Stavrogin might have been sincere in writing the confession. “This document comes straight from the need of a mortally wounded heart—do I understand correctly? Yes, it is repentance and the natural need for it that have overcome you, and you have struck upon a great path, a path of an unheard of sort.” But the deeper question that hangs between them is whether the written confession is an honest statement of Stavrogin’s moral conscience and his guilt, or whether, like Ippolit’s “Necessary Explanation” in The Idiot, it is a self-justifying account written, as Shatov said earlier, out of “moral sensuality.” The sticking point is Stavrogin’s plan to publish the confession. If this is the case, Tikhon tells him, then “repentance cannot go any further.” 47 He suspects that Stavrogin’s motive in publishing the confession is so that his readers’ “hatred will evoke yours, and, hating, will be easier for you than if you were to accept their pity? What is that if not the proud challenge of a guilty man to his judge?” Stavrogin insists that he wants to publish the confession because “I wish you to forgive me, and another with you, and a third . . . the rest had better hate me. I wish it in order to endure [their hatred] with humility.” 48 Tikhon shrewdly guesses that by publishing his confession Stavrogin wants to evoke public hatred and revulsion and thereby enact the role of the “suffering demonic hero,” a romantic pose. “It is as if you purposely want to portray yourself as coarser than your heart would wish.” Stavrogin 46. Ibid., 701. 47. Ibid., 708, 706. 48. Ibid., 706–7; 708 (my addition).

Demons: A Cautionary Tale 

113

imagines himself as “heroic” in this role even if the audience pitied him, since he could still exult over them and hate them. He assumes that the audience’s reaction, like that of Tikhon, would be one of horror “at this great idle force being spent on abomination.” 49 But Tikhon punctures this heroic pose, suggesting that, in addition to horror, readers may also laugh at Stavrogin’s sins as nothing extraordinary. “There are old men who sin in the same way, even contentedly and playfully,” Tikhon tells him. “The whole world is filled with these horrors.” Nevertheless, he acknowledges that Stavrogin’s desire for forgiveness may be sincere, but that the deeper problem is the latter’s unwillingness to forgive himself. Stavrogin protests that he wants to forgive himself, but that Christ will not forgive his sins. Tikhon insists that Christ will forgive him “if only you attain to forgiving yourself. He will forgive you for your intention [to publish out of hatred and self-aggrandizement] and for your great suffering.” But the proud Stavrogin wants forgiveness without repentance. Consequently, the monk advises Stavrogin to give up his plan to publish the confession. “Your deed, if done in humility, would be the greatest Christian deed, if you could endure it. You will put to shame all your pride and your demon. You will win, you will attain freedom.” Tikhon then advises him to put himself under obedience to an elderly monk for five or seven years of penance.50 Stavrogin does agree to put off publication of the confession,but warns that “in my spite I’ll commit some terrible crime.” As we soon see, with his return to Skvoreskniki, Stavrogin has rejected the monk’s advice, instead following the disastrous path that will lead him to suicide. The meeting between Stavrogin and Tikhon in the epilogue is surely one of the most brilliantly complex and profound exchanges Dostoevsky ever wrote. It reveals the fully tragic depths of Stavrogin’s character and sheds light on his desperately repulsive behavior throughout the novel. Moreover, it is important to remember that since he is both a unique character and for Dostoevsky a representative type of the age, he foreshadows the moral dilemmas of the modern, self-conscious autonomous figure who lacks an integral identity, lacks religious faith and a clear moral code to follow, and 49. Ibid., 706, 707. 50. Ibid., 711 (my addition), 712, 713.

114 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

therefore becomes possessed by demonic urges that lead him to despair and suicide. Such would be the predicament Percy would explore more explicitly in the twentieth century.

6 If there is any dim ray of hope in Demons, it lies in Shatov’s defection from the nihilist group and his return to the Orthodox faith, though it costs him his life, and in the pitiable Stefan Trofimovich’s admission of his moral failings and the need for repentance, just before he dies. In their pivotal conversation in part 2, chapter 7, Shatov tells Stavrogin, “I believe in Russia, I believe in her Orthodoxy, I believe in the body of Christ, I believe that a new coming will take place in Russia.” Shatov does not admit to belief in God, but he says, “I will believe in God”; that is, he will search for signs of God in his life.51 His nascent belief, like that of Dostoevsky, is part of a Slavophile nativism that sees Russia as the supreme spiritual force in the redemption of all mankind. At the same time, when his wandering wife returns home pregnant with Stavrogin’s child, Shatov lovingly celebrates their reconciliation and vows to give the child his name. The other ray of hope comes in the buffoonish Trofimovich’s final judgment on the spiritual fate of the “possessed” society. In the chapter before the conclusion, the narrator records the “last peregrination” of Trofimovich after he is dismissed by his long-time sponsor and beloved Varvara Stavrogina. Stefan ventures out on “the road,” where he encounters the harsh realities he has avoided by his life of financial and emotional dependence on Varvara and his years of lying, drinking, and incessant babbling as the liberal-minded “intellectual” leader in the provincial town. His last adventure proves a disaster. Totally incapable of dealing with life on the road, lost and confused, Stefan is finally helped by a traveling Bible saleswoman, Sofya Matveena. Sick and near death, he preposterously offers to join her and sell bibles. Though his plan is delusional, he is nevertheless still capable of discovering truth. He confesses that his life has been a fraud. He sees that, as Pyotr’s father and Stavrogin’s early teacher as a promoter of liberal ideals, he bears a large responsibility for both youths’ faithless lives and for the moral chaos that has infected Skvoreskniki like a plague. “My 51. Ibid., 253 (my emphasis).

Demons: A Cautionary Tale 

115

friend,” he tells Sofya, “I have been lying all my life. Even when I was telling the truth. I never spoke for the truth, but only for myself, I knew that before, but only now do I see.” 52 As he often does, Dostoevsky uses a secondary character to express the central theme of the novel, summed up in the quotation from Luke (8:32–36) that serves as an epigraph to the novel. Stefan voices Dostoevsky’s pessimistic judgment of his age, yet with perhaps a faint sign of hope. “It’s exactly like our Russia,” Stefan says. “These demons will come out of a sick man and enter into swine—it’s all the sores, all the miasmas, all the uncleanness, all the big and little demons accumulated in one great and dear sick man, in our Russia, for centuries, for centuries! I, perhaps, first, at the head, and we will rush, insane and raging, from the cliff down to the sea, and all be drowned, and good riddance to us, but that’s the most we’re fit for. But the sick man will be healed, and ‘sit at the feet of Jesus.’ ” 53 Stefan’s vision, and Dostoevsky’s, is an apocalyptic vision of post-mid-nineteenth-century educated Russian society. There is a slim measure of hope in Stefan the “sick man’s” recognition and the need for a cure, for faith in Christ. The rest of the possessed—the nihilists, the progressive liberals, and the bored idolaters—are, like the swine in the parable, headed for self-destruction. As we see later, Percy issued a similar warning in his own cautionary tales, especially The Thanatos Syndrome. 52. Ibid., 652. 53. Ibid., 655.

116 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Chap ter 6 The Brothers Karamazov Of Darkness and Light

Walker Percy considered The Brothers Karamazov “perhaps the greatest novel ever written” and called Ivan Karamazov’s remark that in a world that had abandoned belief in God “all things are permitted” an explanation for “so much of what has happened in this century.” Dostoevsky, he added, “forecast communism and what would take place with the rise of all these ideologies.” 1 Whether the novel is the greatest ever written is of course debatable, but it is surely Dostoevsky’s greatest achievement. It is the culmination of his deepest religious and philosophical meditations, a brilliantly executed dramatization of the dialectical debate between Christian faith and all the ideologies spawned by belief in reason and science. The debate is primarily focused on Ivan Karamazov, his doubles the Grand Inquisitor and the shabby devil on the one hand, and Ivan’s brother Alyosha and his saintly mentor, the monk Father Zosima, on the other. Dostoevsky had developed many aspects of this debate in earlier works, as we have seen, but what is unique about The Brothers Karamazov is the extent and depth to which he developed an explicitly Christian counter-argument to Ivan’s viewpoint, mainly through the life and writings of the elder monk Zosima and through 1. Lewis A. Lawson and Victor A. Kramer, eds., More Conversations with Walker Percy (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993), 224.

  117

Alyosha’s abiding love for his fellow man. At the same time, Dostoevsky dramatized the central religious debate between rationalism and faith through the lives of all the other major characters—Fyodor Karamazov and his acknowledged sons, Pavel Smerdyakov, Grushenka Svetlov, Katerina Verkhovtsev, Mikhail Rakitin, Father Ferapont, Ilyusha Snegiryov, Kolya Krasokin, and a host of others. As in a finely spun web, all the strands of the novel connect to the central themes, so that actions anywhere in the interwoven narrative web reverberate with meaning across the whole work. This interaction is dialectical and dynamic, a clashing and balancing of opposing views expressed through the complex relationships between the characters. As Percy intuited, perhaps no other novel had achieved the depth of vision or brilliance of organic form as The Brothers Karamazov. And perhaps no other nineteenth-century novel achieved such a powerfully prophetic statement about the central spiritual crisis facing twentieth-century civilization. So much brilliant commentary has already been written on the novel that my goal in this chapter is to concentrate on those themes, actions, and motifs that resonate directly or indirectly with Percy’s analysis of the “age of suicide” in his fiction and nonfiction. I hope to show how Dostoevsky’s novel is a work that prophetically anticipates Percy’s vision of the spiritual crisis facing his contemporary society. To this end I will focus on four interrelated themes: the conflict between secular reason (including scientism) and religious faith (Ivan and Alyosha); the tension between religious faith, doubt, freedom, and the social order (the Grand Inquisitor, Christ, the shabby devil); the relation between eros (especially sexual desire) and caritas (Ivan, Katerina, Dmitri, Grushenka, Father Zosima); and the themes of human suffering and literal and/or spiritual suicide (Ivan, Smerdyakov, the elder monk Zosima). These themes bear directly on Percy’s primary concern with the loss of self and the general impulse toward suicide in modern and postmodern society. Ivan’s predicament can especially be understood as analogous to that of the autonomous self that Percy developed throughout his writings.

6 Dostoevsky focused the debate between secular reason and religious faith, obviously, on the conversation between Ivan and his brother Alyosha in part 2, book 5, chapters 3–5 of the novel. These chapters, which include

118 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Ivan’s parable of the Grand Inquisitor, are the culmination of Dostoevsky’s long engagement in the reason-faith debate among intellectuals in nineteenth-century Russia and Europe. Like all of Dostoevsky’s great protagonists, Ivan’s character is laced with ambiguity and contradiction. As Joseph Frank has said, his personality is torn by a conflict between head and heart.2 In creating Ivan, Dostoevsky pushed the contradiction between exclusive secular reason and the human longing for some transcendent, rational order to its “logical,” irreconcilable end. As Frank notes, Ivan faces this contradiction but refuses to take a leap of faith. Later, Percy would create a similarly ambiguous, conflicted character in Lance Lamar in Lancelot, whose monologue to the silent Father John undoubtedly owes much to the Ivan-Alyosha encounter in Dostoevsky’s novel. Like Ivan, Lance Lamar will also adamantly refuse any leap of faith. Ivan’s predicament is that of the highly self-conscious intellectual faced with the basic existential question of life. To Alyosha he claims that he can accept the idea of God “pure and simple,” but he cannot accept the order of the world created by God “in accordance with Euclidean geometry” because he has a Euclidean mind that makes it impossible for him to comprehend or accept “things that are not of this world.” 3 Ivan’s Euclidean viewpoint implicitly affirms scientism’s all-construing mathematical model of the universe and the mind’s relationship to it—that is, he follows the ideology of reason and science. Ivan categorically rejects the idea of a mysterious God and the mystery of a supernatural/terrestrial order that he cannot rationalize. Viewed from his “logical” perspective, earthly life with its evil and suffering is inexplicable and absurd; it is a mystery that tortures his heart and mind. Consequently, he tells Alyosha that he intends to abandon the world at age thirty and, presumably, commit suicide.4 (All three Karamazov brothers at one time or another think of committing suicide, though Alyosha’s is a brief reaction to his horror at seeing Fr. Zosima’s corrupting body.) 2. Joseph Frank. Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time, ed. Mary Petrusewicz (Princeton, N.J., and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), 848. 3. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans., annotated Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 235–36. All further references are to this edition. 4. Ibid., 236.

The Brothers Karamazov: Of Darkness and Light 

119

Although Ivan rejects “the order of things” and finds life illogical, he also claims—like the suicidal Ippolit in The Idiot and Kirilov in Demons— to love life, the “sticky, springy leaves” and “the blue sky.” His love of life, which he sees as primordial and irrational, contradicts his “Euclidean” mind, a contradiction that he cannot resolve. He tells Alyosha that “you love not with your mind, not with logic, but with your insides, your guts.” 5 But the force of his allegiance to reason and logic counters his nonrational, instinctive will-to-love creation, so much so that at times this conflict cripples Ivan’s will. We see this paralysis, for example, in his sublimated erotic relationship with Katerina Ivanova and, more specifically, when he intuits that his servant Smerdyakov may murder their father Fyodor and nevertheless decides to take a trip to Moscow. Ivan’s ambivalent response to the world, his claimed love of the “sticky, springy leaves” despite the world’s illogicality, reveals him to be a man of conscience with deep empathy for human suffering. The mystery of suffering, especially the gratuitous suffering of children, becomes his rationale for rebellion against God and the order of “things” in the world. Ivan’s argument about the suffering of children is the far-reaching prototype for a central theme in the works of many twentieth-century writers, including Walker Percy. As such, it warrants careful analysis. His rationale is the classic argument made by modern rationalists, atheists, and secular humanists against the goodness of God. It can be found, for example, in religious writers such as Albert Camus (The Plague), Graham Greene (The Heart of the Matter, The Power and the Glory), Flannery O’Connor (The Violent Bear It Away), Walker Percy (The Thanatos Syndrome), and many others. What stands behind Ivan’s challenge, of course, is the New Testament story of the massacre of the Innocents by King Herod, his brutal reaction to Christ’s birth. Ivan’s rationalist mind rejects such a massacre, especially when asked to accept it as the mysterious workings of God’s providence. As we have seen, Dostoevsky was obsessed with the theme of suffering children throughout his life and writings, from his early days when he thought of writing a novel about a child-rape, which he considered the most heinous crime and sin, to the many examples of rape and abuse of children and adolescents shown in 5. Ibid., 236, 230.

120 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

his fiction. Ivan’s protest to Alyosha is a distillation of the author’s life-long concern with this theme. It is important to trace the line of Ivan’s argument to understand its deep and far-reaching philosophical and theological implications. To Alyosha he describes several horrific examples of the gratuitous suffering of children—beatings, rapes, murders, and other humiliations—all examples calculated to elicit revulsion and demonstrate the heartless cruelty of humans: “a beast in every man, a beast of rage, an unrestrained beast left off the chain.” 6 Ivan’s description of man here exhibits a darkly Manichean view of human nature. But his real target is the apparent indifference and cruelty of an unjust, merciless God who arranged “the order of things” in which such brutalities occur and then does nothing to alleviate human suffering, especially the suffering of children. Ivan implies that, given the power, he would be more merciful than God. (He seems to overlook one contradiction in his argument: having earlier claimed that God created the world “in accordance with Euclidean geometry,” he now condemns God for the irrationality of the human “beasts” he created according to that Euclidean plan.) Nevertheless, to Ivan nothing can justify or forgive human suffering, neither God nor Jesus Christ, whom he does not mention. He scorns the theodicy argument that suffering is necessary to create the knowledge of good and evil. “Who wants to know this damned good and evil at such a price? The whole world of knowledge is not worth the tears of that little child of ‘dear God.’ ” 7 Yet Ivan the intellectual does almost nothing to alleviate anyone’s suffering until, near the end of the novel, he offers help to a drunken peasant after first refusing to help him. Edward Wasiolek argued that even Ivan’s late gesture of help is motivated by intellect and not by a compassionate movement of the heart.8 Alyosha counters Ivan’s claim that no one can forgive the gratuitous suffering of children by affirming Jesus’ power to forgive: “He can forgive everything, forgive all and for all, because he himself gave his innocent blood for all and for everything.” Against Ivan’s absurdist view of creation, 6. Ibid., 241–42. 7. Ibid., 242. 8. Edward Wasiolek, Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Major Novels (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1964), 176.

The Brothers Karamazov: Of Darkness and Light 

121

Alyosha proclaims, “It is on him that the structure is being built, and it is on him that they will cry out: ‘Just thou art, O Lord, for thy ways have been revealed.’ ” 9 In subsequent chapters Dostoevsky dramatized Alyosha’s belief through the forgiveness and love he creates between the dying, hateful boy Ilyusha and the gang led by Kolya Krasotkin, reaffirmed in the last scene of the novel when Alyosha assures the grieving boys that they will all rise from the dead and be reunited with Ilyusha. But Ivan still insists that it is “impossible” to love another human being, except in the abstract, though he clearly loves Alyosha and even his rebellious, earthy brother Dmitri. As I have argued, Ivan’s rejection of faith in God because of unjustified human suffering is a prototype for modern rationalists and secular humanists’ ideological stance vis-à-vis belief in a benevolent God. If God is “absent” or cruelly indifferent to human suffering, these rationalists will not be. While acknowledging Ivan’s deep sincerity and that of other secular rationalist-humanists, Alyosha offers the counter-argument for Jesus’ redemptive power, Christ’s power to “forgive all and for all,” because he gave his innocent blood “for all and for everything.” For Alyosha, all human suffering finds its ultimate meaning and justification in Christ the God-man’s sacrificial death and resurrection. For him, all human suffering receives its absolute meaning only through the cross. Without faith in Christ’s redemptive sacrifice, human suffering indeed has no ultimate meaning, and Ivan is correct in protesting against it. But following the logic of Ivan’s argument, it can be said that if suffering has no ultimate meaning and is indeed gratuitous, then the “logical” alternative is suicide. Albert Camus, Thomas Merton, and Walker Percy regarded suicide as the central philosophical issue in the post-Christian modern age. Ivan understands this and claims, as I noted, that he will probably end his life at age thirty. Ivan himself suffers intensely, even heroically. His suffering is spiritual, not physical, as he wrestles with the paradoxes in his predicament as an intellectual. One way to understand him is as an example of Kierkegaard’s self-conscious man in despair. For Kierkegaard, as we recall, the goal of human existence is to discover one’s identity “transparently under God,” which entails a difficult journey through humility, repentance, and 9. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 246.

122 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

faith. The task of true self-discovery “can be performed only by means of a relationship to God.” Kierkegaard equates this process of self-discovery with freedom, a point to remember when we consider the Grand Inquisitor’s dismal view of humanity later. Self-consciousness and suffering are intrinsically linked. Ivan is Kierkegaard’s self-conscious thinker in despair. More specifically, he is the defiant, autonomous man in despair who has detached “the self from every relation to the Power that posited it”—that is, from God.10 However, under Kierkegaard’s dialectical perspective, the self-conscious man in despair is closest to a possible reversal—that is, closest to a “leap of faith,” though nothing of such a reversal is ever suggested in Ivan’s case. Ivan’s protest on behalf of suffering humanity, measured as the secular humanists’ ideal goal of relieving human misery, is not to be gainsaid. However, his motive in using the suffering of children to reject God is decidedly ambiguous. On the one hand, it seems motivated by deep empathy with their plight. But on the other hand, it also suggests a self-serving and, to use a phrase from Demons, a “morally sensuous” gesture, especially if we recall Ivan’s generally detached and often contemptuous attitude toward ordinary humans. Moreover, it reflects Dostoevsky’s larger argument that “lovers of mankind” either are, or eventually would become, “haters of mankind,” of individual human beings. The ambiguity of Ivan’s empathy has important ramifications for the modern debate between secular humanism and religious belief. As we saw, Rene Girard, for example, has called attention to the ambiguity surrounding the modern “concern for victims,” a concern that can be motivated by genuine Christ-like compassion on the one hand or by sentimentality and false pity on the other, especially by those who reject Christ and assume the role of would-be saviors bent on eliminating human suffering at all costs.11 Flannery O’Connor’s famous comment on such self-appointed “saviors” echoed Girard’s point. “Sentimentality is an excess, a distortion of sentiment usually in the direction of an over-emphasis on innocence, and that innocence, whenever it is over-emphasized in the ordinary human condition, tends by some 10. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death, trans., introduction Walter Lowrie (1941; repr. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955), 153, 163, 200–207. 11. Rene Girard. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2001), 16–169.

The Brothers Karamazov: Of Darkness and Light 

123

natural law to become its opposite. We lost our innocence in the Fall, and our return to it is through the Redemption which was brought about by Christ’s death and by our slow participation in it.” 12 “Slow participation” here means human suffering directly linked to Christ’s sacrifice, as Dostoevsky demonstrated, for example, in Sonya Marmeladov’s suffering for her family in Crime and Punishment and in Alyosha’s loving relation to the fractious gang of youths in The Brothers Karamazov. Later, O’Connor pointed to such sentimentality as the root of modern secularism’s attack on Christianity and explicitly cited Ivan’s argument in this regard. “One of the tendencies of our age is to use the suffering of children to discredit the goodness of God, and once you have discredited His goodness, you are done with Him. Ivan Karamazov cannot believe, as long as one child is in torment; Camus’ hero cannot accept the divinity of Christ, because of the massacre of the Innocents. In this popular pity, we mark our gain in sensibility and our loss in vision.” Other ages, she argued, saw with the prophetical, unsentimental eyes of faith. Lacking this faith, we now tend to “govern by tenderness,” tenderness cut off from Christ and “wrapped in theory.” When this separation occurs, the logical outcome of tenderness is “terror,” terror that “ends in forced labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.” O’Connor’s prescient remark resonates with Dostoevsky’s prophetic warning about the spread of totalitarian nihilism disguised as progress in Russia and in the West. Later still, in The Thanatos Syndrome, Percy echoes O’Connor’s point when Father Rinaldo Smith condemns the “tender” Fedville physicians Van Dorn and Comeau and their plan to eliminate human imperfections by secretly drugging citizens. As the priest warns, echoing O’Connor, “tenderness leads to the gas chambers.” 13 In sum, one can trace a direct line from Dostoevsky to O’Connor and Percy in their mutual understanding of the broad implications of rationalist Ivan’s rejection of God in favor of “tenderness” toward suffering children. Ivan’s famous attack on God does take note of the human agents of mur12. Flannery O’Connor, “The Church and the Fiction Writer,” in Collected Works (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 807–13. 13. Walker Percy, The Thanatos Syndrome (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987), 361–62. See also John F. Desmond, “Fyodor Dostoevsky, Walker Percy and the Demoniac Self,” Southern Literary Journal (Spring 2012): 88–107.

124 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

derous violence—the “beast” in every man. But he then abstracts from his concrete examples of childrens’ suffering to advance a theoretical argument against God as a rationalization for his own disbelief. A similar type of argument will be advanced by Ivan’s double, the Grand Inquisitor, as we shall see. Both Ivan and the Inquisitor resent God for not doing their bidding. They reject faith in the possibility of suffering’s transformation by Christ’s death and resurrection. Both would “save” the world on their own terms by eradicating evil and suffering. In this respect, they prefigure Percy’s nihilist doctors Van Dorn and Comeau in The Thanatos Syndrome, who propose to eliminate evil and suffering by using “miracle” drugs.

6 Ivan’s long poem on the legend of the Grand Inquisitor further develops his rebellion against the God who permits unrequited human suffering. Specifically, it focuses the theme of suffering in relation to the question of human freedom versus slavery, and to the “good” of the social order, themes vital to both Dostoevsky and Percy. Kierkegaard, we recall, equated the self’s discovery of itself “transparently under God” with the fulfillment of human freedom.14 But the Inquisitor sees such freedom as a delusion; for him, humans are naturally disposed to be slaves. Here, Dostoevsky presents the Inquisitor as a mock-savior who would “save” mankind from the burden of personal freedom. At the same time, the Inquisitor’s argument reveals the sharp difference between Dostoevsky and Percy on the history and role of the Catholic Church in the West, a reprise of Myshkin’s attack on the church in The Idiot. After stating his defiant refusal of faith to Alyosha, Ivan proposes to demonstrate his argument historically by reciting his “poem,” composed but never published, on the Cardinal Grand Inquisitor’s confrontation with Christ in Seville during the Spanish Inquisition. According to the legend, Christ has returned to earth again and is performing miracles, including raising a girl from the dead, a direct challenge to the Inquisitor’s temporal power and his persecution of alleged heretics. Jesus is arrested and imprisoned, where the ninety-year-old Cardinal Inquisitor, Ivan’s surrogate spokesman, confronts him in his cell. The significance of the encounter, in terms of Percy’s thought and writings, is that it 14. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 164.

The Brothers Karamazov: Of Darkness and Light 

125

sets in opposition two different anthropological views of mankind and two different views of power (temporal and spiritual) and of human freedom. Percy will develop the same themes, updated to the twentieth century, in several works, especially in Love in the Ruins, Lancelot, and The Thanatos Syndrome, as well as in his philosophical essays. The encounter between the Grand Inquisitor and Jesus concentrates on the question of the source and meaning of human freedom. As is well known, Dostoevsky constantly affirmed man’s free will, as well as his capacity to love and forgive others, as the essence of human nature and man’s moral responsibility, the ideal model for which is Christ. The Inquisitor rebukes Jesus for rejecting Satan’s three temptations to demonstrate his divine power over nature. Jesus’ triple refusal to manifest his divine power, as the Inquisitor admits, effectively guarantees human freedom, the individual’s power to reject or accept the gospel message of redemption, the call to repentance, and to unconditional love of God and of fellow human beings. For his part, the Inquisitor insists that “nothing has been more insufferable for man and human society than freedom!” Men are too weak, he argues, to exercise this freedom wisely and will destroy themselves unless controlled by a minority of elite, strong leaders in a magisterial church with absolute temporal power.15 Two antithetical notions of humanity, of freedom and power, are embodied in Jesus and the Inquisitor. Jesus’ rejection of Satan’s three temptations expresses the notion of spiritual freedom, the promise of freedom from sin and death, and of suffering’s salvific value. The Inquisitor preaches a reductive but attractive notion of freedom from material deprivation, from the needs and wants that frustrate the human longing for comfort and earthly happiness. Under his rule, temporal suffering is alleviated, but at the cost of personal freedom. The basis of the Inquisitor’s claim to power and his humanitarian goal of earthly happiness is his anthropological view that, like Ivan’s, is essentially Manichean. He believes that humans are “feeble, depraved nonentities and rebels” who are “incapable of being free.” Their only concern, he maintains, is to have their worldly desires fulfilled; they care nothing for eternal salvation. To him, Jesus’ rejection of earthly power was a “mis15. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 252.

126 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

take” because by insisting on preserving human freedom, he ignored the “earthly bread” that mankind truly longs for. The result, according to the Inquisitor, is that “centuries will pass and mankind will proclaim with the mouth of its wisdom and science that there is no crime, and therefore no sin, but only hungry men,” which was Dostoevsky’s prophesy of the fate of a godless society. The Inquisitor also predicts that, left in freedom, men will eventually build a new Tower of Babel, and society will descend into such chaos and cannibalism that mankind will gladly renounce freedom, turn to the church to fulfill earthly needs, and declare “better that you enslave us, but feed us.” 16 Society will then become an “ant-hill” populated by slaves (“sheep,” “children”): men and women under the church’s control, reduced to the status of docile children. However, to appease the slaves’ feeble consciences, the church elite will have to lie and proclaim that they alone “suffer freedom in the name of Christ.” 17 In his duplicitous role, the Inquisitor becomes the anti-Christ who parodies Christ’s redemptive suffering by promising the earthly salvation and the happiness brought by material comfort. The Inquisitor’s view of history and of the church’s acquisition of temporal power also expresses Dostoevsky’s familiar condemnation of the Catholic Church in the West.18 Dostoevsky argued in several of his writing that the Catholic Church perverted the original gospel of Jesus by merging with the Roman Empire to gain earthly power, here vested in the despotic Cardinal and the Spanish Inquisition. The Inquisitor proclaims that in order to retain earthly power, the church has sworn allegiance to Satan. “Exactly eight centuries ago,” he tells the prisoner Christ, “we took from him [Satan] what you so indignantly rejected. We took Rome and the sword of Caesar from him, and proclaimed ourselves rulers of the earth.” 19 He then reveals their “secret”: the grand deception that the church now exercises power over the sheepish people “in the name of Christ.” The Inquisitor argues that 16. Ibid., 253. 17. Ibid., 261–62. 18. Bruce K. Ward, Dostoevsky’s Critique of the West: The Quest for Earthly Paradise (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfred Laurier, 1986). See also Ellis Santos, Political Apocalypse: A Study of Dostoevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor, 2nd rev. ed. (Wilmington, Del.: ISI, 2000), and Frank, Dostoevsky, 394–95. 19. Ibid., 257 (my addition).

The Brothers Karamazov: Of Darkness and Light 

127

he “wasted his whole life in the desert” trying to fulfill the Christian ideal of self-sacrifice, while no longer believing in God the Father. But he finally abandoned the Christian ideal, conscripted with Satan, assumed power in a dictatorial church, and now poses as a suffering savior of the enslaved masses. Dostoevsky gives the Inquisitor his due as one who suffered in the hope of faith without experiencing it. But in his self-defense, the Inquisitor does not connect his own suffering “in the desert” to Christ’s suffering or mention Jesus’ own brief sense of abandonment when hanging on the cross. Nor does he dwell on the fact that his own goal is not humble acceptance of his predicament; rather, his goal is the exercise of earthly power over enslaved people. Christ suffered for others to create man’s possible freedom from sin and death; the Inquisitor now claims, pretentiously, to “suffer freedom” to create earthly happiness for the enslaved citizens who abandon personal freedom and conscience. Beyond his personal attack on the church in the West, Dostoevsky ironically undercuts Ivan’s “tragic” portrayal of the Inquisitor and his selfserving “suffering” by revealing him as a tyrant over others. In his malice, his deceit, and his contemptuous view of “sheep-like” humanity, he in fact embodies the satanic principle of evil. His rejection of Christ and his “impatience” with Jesus’ refusal of an earthly kingdom (though it preserved human freedom) mirrors Ivan’s own impatient condemnation of a God who does not at once alleviate human suffering. The prisoner Jesus does not respond to the Inquisitor’s powerful yet vicious attack, but simply offers him a kiss at the end of their encounter.

6 Dostoevsky offers the counter-argument to Ivan’s Grand Inquisitor in the words and actions of Alyosha and of his mentor, Father Zosima. Alyosha remains mostly silent throughout Ivan’s recitation of the Inquisitor’s imagined encounter with Jesus, imitating the silence of prisoner Jesus. (Dostoevsky’s model for this seems to be the prisoner Jesus’s near silence to the charges against him when he faces Pilate.) But Alyosha finally protests: “Your Inquisitor doesn’t believe in God; that’s his whole secret!” 20 He sees 20. Ibid., 261.

128 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

that Ivan’s and Inquisitor’s despairing visions are essentially the same and would destroy individual freedom, conscience, morality, and human love. Having rejected faith in God, Ivan cannot fully love the world or other human beings, despite his claimed affection for the “sticky little leaves” and “the blue sky.” Alyosha asks him, “What will you live with, with such hell in your heart and in your head?” Seeing Ivan’s radical isolation, Alyosha predicts, “You’ll kill yourself, you won’t endure it.” Alyosha loves Ivan, and at the end of the conversation he imitates Christ’s kiss of the Inquisitor and kisses his brother.21 Ivan does not commit suicide, of course. But his spiritual and psychological agony, spurred by his guilty conscience, brings about his later collapse into madness. After his three visits to Smerdyakov in part 4, book 11, Ivan comes to recognize his complicity in his father’s murder and in the suicide of Smerdyakov, his double and half-brother. With brilliant irony, Dostoevsky reveals how Ivan’s very reason works to unhinge him in his nightmarish encounter with another double, the shabby devil, whose reality he can neither verify nor dismiss (part 4, book 11, chapter 9). In this encounter, the shabby devil deliberately sows confusion in Ivan’s mind. With his clever double-talk, he acts as a “father of lies” who creates a maddening sense of doubt about reality, a doubt Dostoevsky (and later Percy) attributes to Descartes’s rationalism.22 Ivan is baffled about whether the shabby devil really exists or is merely a projection of his own psyche. Tortured by the nightmarish encounter, Ivan is so tormented with confusion and guilt that he suffers a mental and physical breakdown. By the end of the novel, his only hope for recovery must come through the love and care of others, his brother Alyosha and the beautiful, proud, but loving Katerina Verkhovstev.

6 Dostoevsky’s broader counter-argument to Ivan and the Grand Inquisitor’s anthropology and view of history is expressed by Father Zosima. In three long chapters on the life and writings of Zosima (part 2, book 6), Zosima relates three stories of spiritual conversion: that of his brother Markel; of a wise old man (the “Mysterious Stranger”); and of Zosima himself. Each story presents the protagonist’s conversion from egotism to 21. Ibid., 263. 22. Ibid., 642.

The Brothers Karamazov: Of Darkness and Light 

129

personal awareness of sin and guilt. Each man suffers and discovers a new self-understanding and humility and learns to love others. Each comes to recognize that “all are guilty” and in need of forgiveness, that “all are responsible for all,” and that one must become a “servant” of all, in love and charity.23 Their isolation is overcome by a new sense of communal responsibility, a theme that Percy will develop strongly in all his novels. Each of the three tales expresses Dostoevsky’s rejection of the false goal of trying to ensure human happiness through utopian socialism. On the contrary, Zosima proclaims that “paradise is hidden in each of us,” and, if realized, as the mysterious stranger says, “it will come for me in reality, even tomorrow, and for the rest of my life.” 24 For Dostoevsky, personal suffering, or what Percy would later describe as “ordeal,” if humbly accepted, is the key to developing a “new consciousness.” Zosima’s brother Markel suffers fatally from tuberculosis, but he attains a new vision before he dies.25 The mysterious stranger suffers guilt for fourteen years after having murdered a woman he loved. As a young man Zosima suffered guilt for angrily slapping his servant Afanasy, then was humiliated and dishonored for refusing a duel with a rival, and then repented and asked forgiveness of his servant.26 Subsequently, he resigned his military life and entered the monastery. In each case, Dostoevsky’s vision of redemptive suffering, coupled with faith in the afterlife, counters Ivan’s and the Inquisitor’s despairing view of suffering as useless and implicitly rejects the utopian dream that suffering can be eliminated through science and reason. Percy’s novels will show a similar process of transformation in his novels, but in a much more oblique fashion through subtle patterns of imagery and actions. Dostoevsky’s vision of suffering as potentially redemptive offers a way to understand the powerful erotic undercurrents in the novel. As was the case in Crime and Punishment, there is considerable critical disagreement about Dostoevsky’s treatment of the erotic dimension in all his major novels. Some critics have argued that he failed to show the positive role of erotic 23. Ibid., 289, 298, 303. 24. Ibid., 303. 25. Ibid., 289. 26. Ibid., 297.

130 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

love in the relationship between men and women in his fiction, a situation that cannot simply be explained by reference to the generally oppressive status of women in nineteenth-century Russian society. For example, Rowan Williams has illustrated that there are many examples of erotic frustration and sexual exploitation in The Brothers Karamazov.27 Fyodor Karamazov, patriarch of the “sensuous” Karamazovs, having already abused two wives, then offers to buy Grushenka Svetlov’s sexual favors. Grushenka, seduced earlier by a Polish officer, erotically manipulates both Fyodor and his son Dmitri and at one point even jokes about seducing Alyosha. Dmitri has already sexually humiliated the proud Katerina Verkhovstev by offering to loan her money in exchange for her chastity. For her part, the headstrong Katerina is attracted to the intellectual Ivan, but their mutual pride and willfulness frustrate any fruitful emotional or erotic relationship between them. Even Alyosha, acting mainly from kindness rather than love, becomes precipitously engaged to the sadomasochistic Lisa Khoklokov, but her neuroticism and masochism defeat any possible union between them. As I noted earlier, Williams sees this pattern of erotic frustration as emblematic of Dostoevsky’s “negative theology” wherein “the significance of eros is largely defined by the tracing of its absence or perversion.” 28 While this is true to some extent, it is equally important to see how Dostoevsky also affirmed a Christian counter-vision of love through Father Zosima, a vision in which eros and caritas, physical and spiritual love, can be integrated. Central to this vision is the crucial importance of shared suffering, which helps create a “new consciousness” and spirit of love. This new consciousness brings a realization that one “suffers for all” in a mutual bond of guilt, that all need to be forgiven, and that each is called to show charity to others without righteous judgment. Kierkegaard’s insight about eros and caritas is especially apposite Dostoevsky’s vision here. In distinguishing between erotic love and Christian love, Kierkegaard said that erotic love “prefers one person exclusively as the highest love,” whereas “Christian love means love of God and love of neighbor, the latter equally and without 27. Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2008), 69–70, and Paul Evdokimov, Dostoievski et le probleme du mal (1942; repr. Paris: Declee de Brouwer, 1978), 406–7. 28. Williams, Dostoevsky, 179.

The Brothers Karamazov: Of Darkness and Light 

131

distinction. The command to ‘love thy neighbor’ is an offense to ‘natural man,’ who excludes all but one object of love. Human erotic love must be ‘transformed by the Holy Spirit’ to focus it on unconditional love of God and all neighbors.” 29 We see the beginnings of such a union of eros and caritas in the love between Dmitri and Grushenka near the end of the novel. While Zosima’s description of suffering and conversion expresses Dostoevsky’s belief in the possibility of redemptive love, the monk, through the mysterious stranger, also paints a dismal picture of the current state of society as shaped by the ideology of reason and science and predicts a disastrous outcome. Unless mankind chooses “a different path psychically,” that is, a new awareness and moral vision—the stranger warns, “there will be no brotherhood. No science or self-interest will ever enable people to share their property and their rights among themselves without offense.” Presently, he argues, “human isolation is now reigning everywhere, especially in our age. Everyone now strives most of all to separate his person, wishing to experience the fullness of life within himself, and yet what comes of his efforts is not the fullness of life but full suicide.” Solitariness, greed, egoistic self-reliance, and lust for material security only lead to “suicidal impotence” and despair. Yet despite this gloomy assessment, Zosima hopes for an apocalyptic end to the age of isolation and spiritual suicide, the day when “the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the heavens.” 30 Zossima’s pessimism here is counter-balanced in the subsequent chapter, “From the Talks and Homilies of the Elder Zosima,” in the monk’s ideal of a Christian community of love, service, and spiritual freedom, a sharp contrast to the Grand Inquisitor’s vision. Echoing the mysterious stranger’s words, Zosima says that materialist thinkers idolize science, proclaim “freedom,” and promote the fulfillment of physical needs, but the result is “isolation and suicide.” Consequently, those who “follow science” and reason, in their attempts to create a “just order” without belief in Christ, have already proclaimed that there is “no crime, there is no sin.” Despite technological advances in communication, the human community is fractured by lust, envy, self-indulgence, and greed, a condition of “slavery” to “foolish” 29. Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, ed., introduction and notes Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 44–60. 30. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 303, 304.

132 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

desires. Instead of serving “brotherly love and human unity,” men “have fallen into disunity and isolation.” 31 In contrast to Ivan’s natural affection for “the sticky little leaves, the blue sky,” absent any belief in the divine order, Zosima proclaims that “if you love each thing, you will perceive the mystery of God in things.” Despite human wickedness, Zosima believes that a “loving humility,” anchored in belief in Christ, can triumph. “There is only one salvation for you: take yourself up and make yourself responsible for all the sins of men,” recognizing that “it is you who are guilty on behalf of all and for all.” Faith and humility create a new consciousness, “a secret, mysterious sense of our living bond with the other world,” a sense of our place and identity in the spiritual-temporal order.32 This secret, mysterious consciousness is Zosima’s (and Dostoevsky’s) answer to the Inquisitor’s “secret” lie that he and his minions “suffer” in “Christ-like” fashion on behalf of their enslaved people.

6 To reinforce Zosima’s hopeful response to the despairing visions of Ivan and the Inquisitor, Dostoevsky dramatized the formation of a “new consciousness” of love and universal responsibility in the final scenes of Dmitri’s conversion. Early in the novel (book 2), Zosima bows before the sensualist Dmitri, intuiting that he would undergo a future life of suffering and spiritual trial. In love with Grushenka and insanely jealous of his father, Dmitri threatens to commit suicide when he is first overwhelmed by the thought of losing her to his father. His anguish is compounded by his guilt for having stolen money from Katerina. When he is wrongly accused of parricide and arrested, he initially sinks into despair. But almost miraculously, he suddenly understands that his suffering is necessary for his redemption, for his “resurrection” from the “cave” of egoism and self-indulgence. “Every day of my life I’ve been beating my breast and promising to reform, and every day I’ve done the same vile things. I understand that for men such as I a blow is needed, a blow of fate. Never, never would I have risen by myself!” Now that he faces trial and imprisonment, Dmitri says, “I accept the torment of accusation and my disgrace before all, I want to suffer and be purified by suffering! And perhaps I will be purified by suffering. I am not 31. Ibid., 313, 315, 314. 32. Ibid., 319, 320.

The Brothers Karamazov: Of Darkness and Light 

133

guilty of my father’s blood! I accept punishment not because I killed him, but because I wanted to kill him, and might well have killed him.” 33 While awaiting trial, Dmitri is tempted by the diabolical Rakitin to excuse his guilt by claiming that he has been “a victim of environment.” Rakitin, who wants to write an article about Dmitri “with a tinge of socialism,” argues that belief in the soul and that one is born in the “image and likeness” of God is “all foolishness.” 34 But Dmitri clearly sees the disastrous consequences of Rakitin’s behaviorism. “Rakitin doesn’t like God,” he tells Alyosha. “That’s the sore spot in all of them! But they conceal it. They lie. But I asked: ‘how will man be after that? Without God and the future life? It means everything is permitted now, one can do anything?’ Rakitin replies: ‘Didn’t you know? Everything is permitted to the intelligent man.’ ” 35 Dmitri simply laughs at Ratikin and rejects his glib rationalizations. Dmitri’s awareness of the “new man” emerging in him is reinforced by a dream in which he sees a “suffering child, a wee one” and wonders about the meaning of such suffering and his relationship to it. In this clear contrast to Ivan’s argument about the useless suffering of children, Dmitri willingly accepts his responsibility for them and for all. He will accept prison “because everyone is guilty for everyone else. All people are ‘wee ones.’ And I’ll go for all of them, because there must be someone who will go for all of them. I didn’t kill father, but I must go. I accept!” 36 Dmitri’s expansive vision sees the intrinsic spiritual bond in the human community of suffering. In a clear reflection of Dostoevsky’s own prison experience, Dmitri says, “Even there, in the mines, you can find a human heart in the convict and murderer standing next to you, and you can be close to him, because there, too, it’s possible to live, and love, and suffer. You can revive and resurrect the frozen heart in this convict, bring up from the cave into the light a soul that is lofty now, a suffering consciousness. Lord, let man dissolve in prayer! How would I be there underground without God? Rakitin’s lying. If God is driven from the earth, we’ll meet him underground.” 37 (Percy traced a similar “resurrection” to a new consciousness and escape from the “cave” 33. Ibid., 509. 34. Ibid., 587–89. 35. Ibid., 588. 36. Ibid., 591. 37. Ibid., 591–92 (my emphasis).

134 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

of egoistic despair in the case of Will Barrett in The Second Coming. As we shall see, the suicidal Barrett literally emerges from a cave to find love with Allison Huger and a new commitment to communal responsibility with others.) Yet despite his awareness of “a new man risen in me,” Dmitri fears, correctly, that he is too weak to live up to the vision he has received. He tells Alyosha, “I’m afraid of something else now: that this risen man not depart from me.” 38 When Ivan proposes an escape plan, Dmitri fears that if he agrees he will be escaping his “new man” vision and his desire to “suffer for all.” But the shrewd Alyosha tells Dmitri that he is not ready to assume a martyr’s role and that he should escape with Grushenka to America. “Listen, then: you’re not ready, and such a cross [prison] is not for you” (my addition). He reminds Dmitri that he is innocent of parricide and that “such a cross is too much for you.” Alyosha also encourages him to keep alive in himself the vision of the “new man.” “I say just remember that other man always, all your life, and wherever you escape to—and that is enough for you. That you did not accept that great cross will only make you feel a still greater duty in yourself, and through this constant feeling from now on, all your life, you will do more for your regeneration, perhaps, than if you were there” in prison.39 As Dmitri’s vision makes clear, for Dostoevsky a new consciousness or vision of universal guilt, of responsibility for all, and of possible redemption alone is not sufficient to guarantee the emergence of a “new man.” Even with his new understanding, Dmitri must, like Raskolnikov, undertake a long and humbling process of suffering commitment to others. Yet he has the love of his brother Alyosha, and most importantly, the love of Grushenka, to sustain and nurture his growth. In the couple, we see a transformation of erotic desire into love as caritas. Grushenka has already pledged her love for Dmitri and will go with him to America. In their coming together Dostoevsky envisions a fruitful union of eros and caritas, of two lovers pledged to each other in body and spirit and pledged to help others. Their love has helped Dmitri overcome despair and suicide.

38. Ibid., 591. 39. Ibid., 763–64.

The Brothers Karamazov: Of Darkness and Light 

135

Part 2

Walker Percy

Walker Percy

Wal k er Perc y and the Age of Suicide Chap ter 7 Walker Percy and the Age of Suicide

When they ask you about it, tell them he’s gone to America.   —Last words of Svidrigalov before his suicide in Crime and Punishment Where have all the child molesters come from?   —Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos

To move from Fyodor Dostoevsky to Walker Percy is to cross a vast chronological and cultural divide, from post-mid-century Russia to post-midcentury America, a roughly hundred years that witnessed a radical and violent transformation of European, Russian, and American societies unprecedented in modern history. The social changes are by now so well known as to not require any rehearsal here. What the preceding chapters on Dostoevsky have tried to demonstrate is the philosophical, religious, and moral continuities that exist between the two writers by examining themes, images, and patterns of action in Dostoevsky’s major works to suggest how they anticipate similar concerns in Percy’s writings. The linchpin in this study of continuities is the theme of suicide, focused on individual suicides as representative of the broader threat of cultural suicide. This is not simply

  139

a matter of Dostoevsky’s influence on Percy, true as that certainly is. Rather, it is a matter of seeing how Dostoevsky’s prophetic forebodings about the coming age in civilization, its suicidal impulse, came to be largely realized in the twentieth century. Percy’s fiction and nonfiction are primarily concerned with how those forebodings are manifested in the postmodern age, and, as with Dostoevsky, suicide and the struggle against the suicidal impulse—both individually and culturally—became the defining metaphor in Percy’s diagnosis of the age. Suicide, in Percy’s vision, as I have argued, is intrinsically related to the predicament of modern self-consciousness shaped by the dominant cultural influence of scientism and manifested in the spread of aberrant sexual behavior and flagrant violence. Percy emphasized the importance of these confluent themes through the example he chose to distinguish his focus as a writer from that of other American writers in the Southern tradition. In a revealing interview with Jo Gulledge, he described Quentin Compson’s predicament in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury as the starting point for his fiction. I’m a kind of maverick; that is, I don’t fit in to the Southern pattern. All my characters, whether from Binx Bolling to Will Barrett to Thomas More and the others, find themselves in a here-and-now predicament. And the whole backdrop is the historical scene which is drawn so well by Shelby [Foote], Eudora [Welty] and Faulkner. It’s there, all right, but my character is looking in the opposite direction; he’s not looking back. And that’s why I’ve felt more akin to Faulkner’s Quentin than to anybody else in his fiction because he’s trying to get away from it. He is sick of time because time means the past and history.1

Quentin suffers despair over his sister Caddie’s loss of virginity and the loss of family honor it implies. Unable to accept his sister’s seduction by Dalton Ames, Quentin fantasizes a dream world inhabited by him and Caddie alone, a fantasy that reveals his own fear of sexuality and his incestuous attachment to an “innocent” Caddie. To compound his agony, Quentin’s attempt to avenge his sister’s dishonor by challenging Ames to a duel and killing him fails ludicrously. Moreover, his nihilistic father tells him that 1. Lewis A. Lawson and Victor A. Kramer, eds., Conversations with Walker Percy (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985), 299 (my additions).

140 

Walker Percy

both Caddie’s loss of virginity and the family “honor” are meaningless, because “nothing is worth the changing of it.” 2 To Quentin’s father, the Christian tradition is totally bankrupt: “Father said that. The Christ was not crucified: he was worn away by a minute clicking of little wheels,” a victim of time’s progression. That traditional Christian belief in Jesus’ redemption, still a vital force in Dostoevsky’s culture, has been substantially eroded by the time we reach Faulkner, and even more so in Percy’s postmodern world. Shattered by these revelations, and later by being wrongly accused of stalking a young girl, an irony that drives him to hysterical laughter, Quentin commits suicide while a student at Harvard. Quentin’s predicament and his suicide, as Percy intuited, stand as a symbol of the collapse of the post–Civil War Southern aristocratic, stoic cultural tradition of honor and virtue. But beyond its importance for Southern culture, it also stands in Percy’s mind as a classic example of the predicament of the isolated self-conscious self and of the postmodern American’s inability to come to terms with sexuality, as we shall see, as well as for the general despair and suicidal drift in Western society. Percy’s fictional starting point, as he argued, was with characters struggling to elude Quentin’s fate. “I would like to think of starting where Faulkner left off, with the Quentin Compson who didn’t commit suicide. Suicide is easy. Keeping Quentin Compson alive is something else. In a way, Binx Bolling is Quentin Compson who didn’t commit suicide.” 3 (In a significant triangulation between Quentin Compson, Binx Bolling, and Raskolnikov, Percy compared Binx’s predicament of alienation and metaphysical rebellion to that of the protagonists.)4 Percy viewed Quentin not just as a super-sensitive déclassé Southerner, but also as a representative type within American culture, like Dostoevsky’s portrayal of Ivan Karamazov, Stavrogin, and Raskolnikov as ideological types. Consequently, despite their vast cultural differences, we can see all four protagonists as highly intelligent young men struggling to transcend their pasts while trapped in their own conflicted self-consciousness in a world of shifting meanings and declining traditional values. Like his 2. William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (New York: Vintage, 1984), 97. 3. Lawson and Kramer, Conversations with Walker Percy, 300. 4. Ibid., 298.

 

Walker Percy and the Age of Suicide 

141

Russian mentor, Percy saw these particular themes—self-consciousness, sexuality, violence—as symptomatic of a broader cultural predicament. After reading critic Lewis P. Simpson’s analysis of Quentin Compson’s sexual-suicidal predicament, Percy noted his similar concern in Lancelot and extrapolated from both his and Faulkner’s novels to posit a general twentieth-century pathology, what he called “the incapacity of the post-modern consciousness to deal with sexuality.” 5 As we shall see, the extent of Percy’s concern with this pathology becomes evident not only in Lancelot but throughout his fiction.

6 Quentin Compson is not a self-conscious intellectual rebel like Dostoevsky’s underground man or like Raskolnikov, Ivan Karamazov, Stavrogin, Ippolit, or Kirilov. His suicide in the Charles River is the culmination of a gripping emotional and psychological crisis, a fatal attempt to escape time and the relentless dissolution of all values it portends for him. His suicide is not a defiant rebuke thrown in the face of God or a cruel, unjust universe, which is generally true of Dostoevsky’s rebels. Dostoevsky’s anti-heroes are truly metaphysical rebels. They revolt against what they perceive as the malignant order of the universe, run either by blind nature or by an indifferent, cruel God. His dramatizing of the “metaphysical revolt” by these characters served as a transitional theme to the twentieth century, especially for European existentialist thinkers and writers. The writings of Albert Camus, which Percy studied assiduously, served as a historical bridge between Percy’s personal experience, his philosophical and fictional writings, and Dostoevsky. In his classic study of suicide and writing, The Savage God, a copy of which Percy owned, critic A. Alvarez stated that “it is on the question of suicide that Dostoevsky acts as a bridge between the nineteenth century and our own [twentieth century].” 6 Alvarez describes Dostoevsky’s obsession with suicide in his fiction and in his Diary of a Writer and how through his character Kirilov in Demons he presented the pure nihilist argument for suicide. As we recall, Kirilov says:

5. Lewis P. Simpson, Imagining Our Time: Recollections and Reflections on American Writing, introduction Fred Hobson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007), 224. 6. A. Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide (New York: Random House, 1970), 222.

142 

Walker Percy

I am bound to express my unbelief. . . . No higher than that there is no God exists for me. . . . All man did was to invent God so as to live without killing himself. That’s the essence of universal history until now. I am the only man in universal history who for the first time refused to invent God . . . if there is no God, man’s will is his own.7

In contradictory fashion, Kirilov commits suicide both to affirm his nihilistic belief and to protest against the philosophical necessity it logically implies—since absolute nihilism renders free will meaningless. His suicide is not the result of the intensely subjective despair we see in Quentin Compson. Rather, by killing himself he wishes to transcend both “God” and nihilism. His revolt against the situation imposed by an “absurd” cosmic order anticipates Camus’s focus on a similar human predicament in The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. For Camus, Kirilov was a representative figure: modern man confronted with an absurd universe, a “metaphysical crime” wherein man’s search for meaning is frustrated by an irrational universe devoid of any inherent meaning except that created by man himself.8 Percy acknowledged being strongly influenced by Camus’s thought and art, though he disagreed with the philosophy of the absurd spelled out in The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Percy was sympathetic to the initial predicament of Camus’s protagonists, their search for meaning in a fractured, often irrational world, a predicament similar to that of many of Percy’s own protagonists. And although he criticized it as something of an “intellectual over-simplification,” Percy cited Camus’s famous remark that “there is but one serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide,” to help explain Dr. Sutter Vaught’s obsession with sex and suicide in The Last Gentleman.9 (Camus’s remark is echoed in Wittgenstein’s Notebook, another work Percy owned: “Suicide is the pivot of all ethical systems.”)10 Yet Percy differed from Dostoevsky and Camus in the sense that his potential suicides, rather than directly rebelling against the cosmic order, are more in revolt against the tawdry culture they inhabit, the absurdity of a culture obsessed with 7. Quoted in ibid., 217, 220. 8. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Random House Vintage, 1959), 77–81. 9. Lawson and Kramer, Conversations with Walker Percy, 164. 10. Alvarez, Savage God, 220.

 

Walker Percy and the Age of Suicide 

143

satisfying immanent desires, while seemingly oblivious to concern for the ultimate meaning of life and human destiny. They suffer, as Percy said, from “ontological deprivation,” an unawareness of metaphysical reality, though they do experience, often subconsciously, a growing sense of spiritual malaise that is only intensified by the diversions they use to try to escape it. Percy also differed from Dostoevsky and Camus in his emphasis on the central role of sexuality in the “derangement” of the postmodern consciousness and how it came to be manifested in violence and suicide throughout American culture. Percy’s view of the relationship between postmodern sexuality and suicide derived from his understanding of the state of contemporary consciousness. He saw at the end of the modern age the emergence of a “new consciousness”—that is, “a new breed of person in whom the potential for catastrophe—and hope—has suddenly escalated.” While acknowledging the technological advances in modern weaponry that make modern war catastrophic, Percy at the same time stressed “a comparable realignment of energies within the human psyche. The psychical forces released in the post-modern consciousness open unlimited possibilities for both destruction and liberation, for an absolute loneliness or a rediscovery of community and reconciliation.11 The “unlimited possibilities for both destruction and liberation” are a direct consequence of the emergence of the “autonomous self,” the self-willed individual witnessed in Dostoevsky’s anti-heroes and now become primary actors in Percy’s postmodern culture. The autonomous self stands alone, having divested itself of traditional religious beliefs and traditional understandings of man’s essential human nature, his relationship with the divine Being, and with other human beings. Percy’s thesis about the emergence of a new consciousness at the end of the modern age can be traced back to St. Paul, but more immediately to Dostoevsky and other writers such as Romano Guardini. The theme of a new consciousness in Dostoevsky’s writings takes two antithetical forms. One is the type of suffering consciousness portrayed in Dmitri Karamazov after his arrest for patricide. The suffering new consciousness is that which can emerge after a person experiences a traumatic ordeal, such as Dmitri 11. Percy, “Notes for a Novel about the End of the World,” in The Message in the Bottle (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), 112; Simpson, Imagining Our Time, 198.

144 

Walker Percy

is undergoing after his arrest.12 It is a consciousness that brings one into intimate relationship with Christ and a humble insight into the profound meaning of suffering, guilt, and Christ’s redemption. It also creates a genuine sense of love and community with flawed humanity, such as Raskolnikov experiences in the epilogue to Crime and Punishment. This suffering consciousness is also exemplified by the elder monk Zosima and, in some degree, by Prince Myshkin. The scriptural model, as I have suggested, is St. Paul’s concept of the new man in Christ. The second form of new consciousness is that exemplified by Kirolov, Stavrogin, the underground man, Lopatkin, and other nihilistic characters in Dostoevsky’s novels. That is, it is the consciousness of autonomous man, the egoistic, self-willed, and self-proclaimed “new man” who rejects all traditional religious, moral, or psychological definitions of individual character. Percy regarded this type of new consciousness, propelled by its allegiance to the ideology of reason and science, as fundamentally “deformed,” “possessed” by demons, and trapped in determinism. We saw an anticipation of this deformed mind in the underground man, who sees himself as a victim of inescapable “laws of nature,” and as such, sees consciousness itself as a “disease.” 13 Significantly, in the Space Odyssey section of Lost in the Cosmos, the ETI creature persistently asks the earthlings the crucial question: “What is the state of your consciousness?” 14 The predicament of the postmodern self is compounded by what Percy saw as the “wearing out of language,” which intensifies the alienation of the autonomous self and dims the prospects for a “rediscovery of community and reconciliation.” Nowadays, Percy said in an interview, “people say words, and words have become as worn as poker chips, they don’t mean anything.” This is especially true of traditional religious language and symbols. “Particularly religious words: baptism, sin, God. Things get worn out, and there is always the problem of rediscovering them. As the Psalmist says, you have to sing a new song: I think this is one of the functions of the 12. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans., annotated Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 509; 591–97. 13. Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans., ed. Michael R. Katz (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 6–8. 14. Percy, Lost in the Cosmos (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), 206–18.

 

Walker Percy and the Age of Suicide 

145

novelist.” 15 A writer of genius—Percy mentions Joyce in this context—may be able to rejuvenate the language, but what of the ordinary individual in a postmodern culture? Such an individual feels the intense pressure of alienation and loneliness and the extreme difficulty of relating to another human being openly and honestly, using language. His predicament is further exacerbated by the fact that he, like most of his fellow citizens, has been indoctrinated with the language of empirical science and the jargon of the social sciences, which objectifies the individual into abstract categories of definition and meaning (e.g., consumer, liberal, sociopath, humanist) that rob the unique person of sovereignty. Lewis P. Simpson has concisely summarized the predicament of the self-conscious, postmodern individual as Percy described such an individual in Lost in the Cosmos. “The self, searching for a sign of itself, attempts to understand itself as a ‘semiotic entity’ or a ‘spiritual entity.’ Failing to find such a sign, the frustrated self seeks its own autonomy.” But the self only encounters “the expanding nought” of itself and so becomes subject to “demonic possession.” In its frustration, the demonic self secretly nourishes “a desire for war” and “hatred of all other selves and perhaps its own self most of all.” Furious at the “nothingness” it experiences, the demonic autonomous self, “in the continuing hatred of the deprivation of its meaning, seeks its own extinction.” Suicide, in this context, can be seen as an act of rebellion against the deprivation of the self’s meaning.16

6 Short of engaging in suicidal, catastrophic war or actually committing suicide, one primary way in which the “demoniac” autonomous self attempts to transcend its radical isolation from others and express itself autonomously is through sexual intercourse. But the attempt to connect in this fashion usually fails, for two principal reasons. One is that the conventional language of affection and intimacy— “love,” “dearest,” “caring”—has been crassly commercialized and emptied of existential meaning in the culture. And second, given the dominant scientific and objective ideology with its empirical and abstractive categories of understanding, the sexual act itself has been reduced to a biological and psychological exchange, emptied of 15. Lawson and Kramer, Conversations with Walker Percy, 140–41. 16. Percy, Lost in the Cosmos, 157, 192.

146 

Walker Percy

metaphysical and moral content and largely reduced to the level of physical gratification. Given that situation, and given the frustration and desperation of the autonomous self in its failure to find intimate communion with another, the act itself becomes an exercise in solipsistic satisfaction and power manipulation. As Percy noted, postmodern Western society is both the most eroticized and the most violent in history, suffused with a pathology of flagrant sexual behavior and violence that coalesces in acts of sexual domination, rape, child abuse, murder, and suicide. In Lost in the Cosmos Percy indicated the central role of sexuality in the postmodern self by describing two common views of sexuality, then suggesting a third view. The first view understands the sex drive in strictly biological terms—that is, as one of the several needs of the organism—like hunger, thirst, shelter—to be fulfilled to sustain life and continue the species. The second view, the “religious-humanistic” view, understands the sex drive as “an expression, perhaps the ultimate expression, of love and communication between a man and a woman,” best exemplified in marriage and the family. The third view, obviously Percy’s own, sees postmodern sexuality “as a unique trait of the present-day self . . . occupying a central locus in the consciousness particularly as it relates to other sexual beings, of an order of magnitude and power incommensurate with other ‘drives’ and also specified by the very structure of the present-day self as its very core and as its prime avenue of intercourse with others.” 17 Given this view of the postmodern consciousness, Percy adds that pornography is not just an aberration, but rather a “salient and prime property of modern consciousness, of three hundred years of technology and the industrial revolution, and is symptomatic of a radical disorder in the relation of the self to other selves.” 18 Neither Dostoevsky nor Camus explicitly discussed sexual malaise as being at the heart of the modern spiritual predicament of the self-conscious individual, as Percy did. In contrast to them, Percy attempted to show the psycho-spiritual locus of the malaise to be in the view of sexuality informed by the new ideology of reason and science, which came about as a result of the transforming impact of that ideology on modern consciousness. In his seminal essay, “Notes for a Novel about the End of the 17. Ibid., 10. 18. Ibid.

 

Walker Percy and the Age of Suicide 

147

World,” as we shall see, Percy set out to show how this transformation is directly related to postmodern sexual malaise and helped create a suicidal ethos that threatened the loss of humanity itself.

6 As we saw, Dostoevsky’s representative suicides—the child fetishist Svidrigalov, the nihilist Kirilov, and the child molester Stavrogin—are all possessed by demonic forces. Percy also believed that postmodern man was likewise “possessed.” More than half a century after Dostoevsky, he analyzed how these forces had become a prevailing spirit in Western culture. When he said that not even Dostoevsky could imagine what man without God was capable of in the twentieth century, he was not simply referring to the many horrors and social upheavals that have occurred—the collapse of Christendom, the rise of nihilism, two world wars, the Holocaust, and the threat of nuclear annihilation. Rather, he was also referring to the radical transformation of human consciousness brought about by technology and by the dominance of scientism as an all-construing ideology in Western culture. I quote the crucial paragraph from “Notes for a Novel about the End of the World” in full: The wrong questions are being asked. The proper question is not whether God has died or been superseded by the urban-political complex. The question is not whether the Good News is no longer relevant, but rather whether it is possible that man is presently undergoing a tempestuous restructuring of his consciousness which does not presently allow him to take account of the Good News. For what has happened is not merely the technological transformation of the world but something psychologically even more portentous. It is the absorption by the layman not of the scientific method but of the magical aura of science, whose credentials he accepts for all sectors of reality. Thus in the lay culture of a scientific society nothing is easier than to fall prey to a kind of seduction which sunders one’s self from itself into an all-transcending “objective” consciousness and a consumer-self with a list of “needs” to be satisfied. It is this monstrous bifurcation of man into angelic and bestial components against which old ideologies must be weighed before new ideologies are erected. Such a man could not take account of God, the devil, and the angels if they were standing before him, because he has already peopled the uni-

148 

Walker Percy

verse with his own hierarchies. When the novelist writes of a man “coming to himself” through some such catalyst or ordeal, he may be offering obscure testimony to a gross disorder of consciousness and to the need of recovering oneself as neither angel nor organism but as a wayfaring creature somewhere between.19

Percy’s crucial statement about the “tempestuous restructuring” of modern consciousness demands close attention. When he argued that modern man has absorbed and been absorbed by the “magical aura” of science, he was of course suggesting that modern man has consciously or unconsciously accepted the principles and values of scientism. As we recall, Voegelin described scientism’s claim that all reality, including human existence, can be completely understood by reason and by the science of phenomena as “magic.” 20 Percy echoed Voegelin’s view and, like him, saw the acceptance of these principles as disastrous for humanity, leading to a “bifurcation” of the integral self—the human person—into an “objective” consciousness and a “consumer” self. The logical end of the principles of scientism is determinism—with human beings understood essentially as organisms governed by the strict laws of nature. To the extent that humans accept such definition, knowingly or not, they become slaves of scientism and consumerism. Ironically and paradoxically, the modern secular gospel of individualism (especially strong in American culture), which heralds autonomous free choice as one of its principal values, has combined with scientism to create a technocratic culture that enslaves humans to its utilitarian principles and values. Scientism and technology, combined with the belief in individualism, does create a certain amount of pragmatic freedom, but at a terrible price. Since scientism excludes the transcendental order, humanity’s spiritual essence, and eternal destiny, freedom is radically narrowed to immediately practical ends. Such “choice” lacks absolute meaning and value. Insofar as they capitulate to the scientistic worldview, Percy held, humans turn over their lives to them, the so-called experts of the culture who define and shape its 19. Percy, “Notes for a Novel,” 113. 20. Eric Voegelin, “What Is Scientism?,” in Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 10, Published Essays 1940–1952, ed., introduction Ellis Santos (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 191.

 

Walker Percy and the Age of Suicide 

149

values. This capitulation, in fact, is suicidal for the human person, a “giving of one’s life” over to the deterministic cultural forces of “need” and “satisfaction” at work in society on both an individual and a collective level. With such capitulation, postmodern man, in Percy’s view, suffers from despair, what Kierkegaard called the “sickness unto death.” If postmodern man is “sick unto death” as a slave of scientism and consumerism, and if traditional religious and ethical concepts and language have been devalued, principles of moral responsibility and sin are likewise devalued. The notion of moral responsibility, absent a transcendental framework of meaning, is reduced to utilitarian values alone, subject to relative interests. Traditional beliefs in free will and sin, which are only truly meaningful in the context of man’s immortality, eternal destiny, and judgment, are radically devalued, as both Ivan Karamazov and the monk Zosima saw. The notion of sexual “sin” in particular becomes meaningless, as Percy’s Binx Bolling and Lance Lamar discovered. If postmodern man is not truly free, he can’t really sin, as Kierkegaard also demonstrated.21 Given this predicament, Percy chose to focus on postmodern man’s fundamental “derangement,” as he told Zoltan Abadi-Nagy. I am perfectly willing to believe Flannery O’Connor when she said, and she wasn’t kidding, that the modern world is 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 is fair to say, doesn’t know who he is, what he believes, or what he is doing.22

The paradox, as we saw in Dostoevsky’s protagonists, is that even with a transformed and objective consciousness, modern man still feels responsibility and guilty, even if sin as such is no longer admitted. The challenge Percy’s protagonists face is how to reconcile and integrate these conflicting elements in the self—and try to discover an integral self and role in the world. 21. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death, trans., introduction Walter Lowrie (1941; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955), 208–35. 22. Lawson and Kramer, eds., More Conversations with Walker Percy (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993), 141–42.

150 

Walker Percy

It is important to stress that Percy emphasized that the predicament created by modern culture’s capitulation to scientism and the “bifurcation of the self” must first be understood before any “new theologies” can be created. On the one hand, the “old” theologies—belief in the transcendental order, the metaphysical view of man, the sacramental view of all reality—have seemingly been undermined by the emerging new ideologies. On the other hand, given what Percy saw as the “emptying out” of traditional theology’s forms, language, and rituals, rote adherence to these forms might simply reveal an evasion of the problematic aspects of the modern predicament of restructured consciousness. But for the highly self-conscious person who is aware of the predicament, only three alternatives seem open: (1) capitulation to the reigning zeitgeist, which is ultimately suicidal for the self; (2) actual suicide, which may be, in part, a protest (and a sign of longing) against the collapse of traditional values and the dead-end of nihilism, as well as a desperate attempt to assert metaphysical freedom, as in the case of Kirilov in Demons; or, (3) resistance and rebellion against the dehumanizing cultural norms of the new ideology by those who become aware of its many traps and delusions. And what of those postmodern citizens who, unlike the highly selfconscious individuals, are oblivious to the social, moral, and psychological effects of scientism, the bifurcation of the self into angel and beast, into an objective and consumer self—both variants of Cartesian dualism—and to their loss of existential freedom? Eric Voegelin offered this gloomy analysis: As a consequence of this belief [in scientism], the occupation with science and the possession of scientific knowledge has come to legitimate ignorance with regard to all problems that lie beyond a science of phenomena. The spreading of the belief has had the result that the magnificent advance of science in Western civilization is paralleled by an unspeakable advance in mass ignorance with regard to the problems that are existentially the important ones.23

Voegelin believed that such ignorance “could be repaired by learning,” but that insofar as “belief in the self-sufficient ordering of existence through science is socially entrenched, it has become a force that actively prevents 23. Voegelin, “What Is Scientism?,” 10:193 (my addition).

 

Walker Percy and the Age of Suicide 

151

the cultivation of human substance and corrodes the surviving elements of cultural tradition still further.” Such a situation of ignorance becomes a “civilizational disaster.” 24 Percy partly shared Voegelin’s pessimism about modern culture, and as a novelist writing about characters who face this predicament, he saw the need for some “catalyst or ordeal” to awaken them to full awareness, with the hope of “recovering oneself as neither angel nor organism,” but as a sovereign, free “wayfaring creature somewhere between.”

6 Percy was quite familiar with and certainly endorsed Voegelin’s general analysis of modern Western culture. He saw that total acceptance of the ideology of scientism is tantamount to spiritual suicide because it denies the spiritual nature of man and radically diminishes personal being and freedom. Such a “self”-abnegation creates a vacuum in which, Percy argued, the self falls prey to possession by demonic powers. In Lost in the Cosmos, he focused on the relationship between the vacuum in postmodern human beings (the split between “angelic” self-consciousness and “bestial” appetite), demonic possession, and sexual violence. In his analysis he spelled out the psychological and moral relationship among these three elements, all of which Dostoevsky anticipated earlier in his characters Svidrigalov, Kirilov, and Stavrogin. In his semiotic parable in Cosmos, Percy argued that the postmodern self, a unique person of spirit and body, is “unspeakable”—that is, unable to know or name itself by its own power. Therefore, it must be “informed”—that is, “named”—by some other agent or power. In different historical periods, the self was informed by “cosmological myths, by totemism, by belief in God— whether the God of Christianity, Judaism, or Islam.” 25 However, Percy argues, citizens in modern technological society have largely abandoned these modes of identification in favor of claiming a radical personal autonomy— that is, the “autonomous man” of self-will who inhabits a culture where in many ways “all things are permitted.” Autonomous man is “deranged,” Percy says, since he is unable to know or identify himself by his own power. He literally does not know who or what he is, and is therefore “lost in the 24. Ibid. 25. Percy, Lost in the Cosmos, 117, 178.

152 

Walker Percy

cosmos.” And given his uniqueness as a sign-user who can name all reality (except himself), he must be informed—that is, possessed—by some other spiritual force or power. The “autonomous self” in modern technological society is largely “possessed by the spirit of the erotic and the secret love of violence.” Possession by the spirit of the erotic and the secret love of violence, he maintains, is “demonic possession.” Philosophically, it can be seen as his answer to the question “Where do all the child molesters come from?” 26 Percy comes to this conclusion in Lost in the Cosmos after describing all the failed attempts by the autonomous self to escape the vacuum in being— its sense of alienation, “nothingness,” and non-being—by indulgence in diversions such as sports, travel, television-viewing, recreation, drugs, alcohol, and finally, sex and violence, the two most visceral attempts to overcome alienation and assert a self in a concrete way. Both forms of visceral diversion, when combined and practiced by autonomous man, are demonic. Both fail of their objective, leaving the alternatives of constant repetition and despair, murder and/or suicide—or spiritual conversion.27 It should be understood that when Percy used the term “demonic” and the phrase “demonic possession” he was affirming, as Dostoevsky did, a belief in the objective reality of Satan, or what Percy called an “unbenign” spirit.28 For both writers, Satan is a real spirit who can come to possess subjectivity through an incarnate being, a person, as we see represented, for example, in the Grand Inquisitor-Cardinal and in the shabby devil who appears to Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov. All the nihilists in Demons, of course, are inspired by Satan. Ontologically, the devil is a “nobody,” a force of non-being and death, but one that can nevertheless possess human beings and work for their spiritual destruction and death, often through madness and suicide. Percy also affirmed that it is possible for an entire culture or historical period to become “deranged,” possessed by the demonic forces of eros and death—an age infected with a suicidal “thanatos syndrome.” This is the perverse love of death that Freud detected, and warned about, as a prevalent spirit in Western technological society, and that Percy especially warned about in his last novel, The Thanatos Syndrome. 26. Ibid., 178, 187. 27. Ibid., 157–58, 174–98. 28. Ibid., 174–98.

 

Walker Percy and the Age of Suicide 

153

Chap ter 8 The Moviegoer Skirting the Abyss

Speaking of his first published novel, The Moviegoer, Walker Percy said he was “mainly interested in the predicament of modern man, afflicted as he is with feelings of uprootedness, estrangement, anxiety and the like.” More specifically, he said, “My novel is an attempt to portray the rebellion of two young people against the shallowness and tastelessness of modern life. The rebellion takes two different forms. In Kate, it manifests itself through psychiatric symptoms: anxiety, suicidal tendencies and the like. In Binx it is a ‘metaphysical rebellion’—a search for meaning which is the occasion of a rather antic life in a suburb of New Orleans. The antecedents of this book are European rather than American: Dostoevski, Rilke and especially Camus.” 1 In a later interview with Jo Gulledge, he compared Binx Bolling’s sense of alienation to that of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment.2 But as we shall see, Binx and Kate’s predicament and their response to it not only echo that of Raskolnikov, but also that of other major Dostoevsky characters. The alternatives to rebellion, as Binx and Kate realize, are despair (spiritual suicide), actual suicide, or acquiescence to the “malaise” they see in contemporary society. As Percy acknowledged and Martin Luschei has demonstrated, The Mov1. Lewis A. Lawson and Victor A. Kramer, eds., Conversations with Walker Percy (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985), 13. 2. Ibid., 298.

154

iegoer owes much of its philosophical-religious vision to Søren Kierkegaard, especially to The Sickness unto Death, as well as to other existentialist thinkers like Camus, Heidegger, and Marcel.3 To this can be added the major philosophical and religious themes developed in Dostoevsky. Joseph Frank has shown that strong similarities in vision also exist between Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky regarding the relationship between religious faith, reason, and doubt.4 The same is true, I believe, for the relationship between Percy and both Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky. One of my main goals in this chapter is to show how the visions of these two nineteenth-century thinkers, especially about suicide broadly construed, help shape the action and meaning of The Moviegoer. A second major goal is to show how Percy, writing in a postmodern culture radically different from that of Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, further advanced their visions of the modern predicament, especially of spiritual suicide, as he saw it manifested in mid-twentieth-century America. In analyzing The Moviegoer, it is important to recall Kierkegaard’s notion of the self’s fundamental being or identity because it helps explain Binx and Kate’s predicament. As we saw, in The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard maintained that the self can only know itself transparently under God—that is, as dependent for its being on God, a claim that Percy, as we have seen, frequently endorsed. For Kierkegaard, the self is a synthesis of the eternal and the temporal, of infinitude and finitude; the self is “spirit.” Therefore, to reject God as the source of being, either consciously or unconsciously, is to refuse to become a genuine self, a form of despair or “suicide.” The task of the individual is to “become” a self by recognizing its dependence on God and act concretely as a fully free, human person. As Kierkegaard asserts, “The more consciousness, the more self; the more consciousness the more will, and the more will the more self.” 5 But the task of becoming a self is thwarted if consciousness is deformed so that one denies dependence on God and acts as an autonomous self. In 3. Martin Luschei, The Sovereign Wayfarer: Walker Percy’s Diagnosis of the Malaise (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972), 64–111. 4. Joseph Frank, Fyodor Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time, ed. Mary Petrusewicz (Princeton, N.J., and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), 128, 221–22, 800. 5. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death, trans., introduction Walter Lowrie (1941; repr. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955), 162.

The Moviegoer: Skirting the Abyss 

155

such a case, the self eventually becomes trapped in determinism, in necessity and fatalism, one of the principal forms of despair.6 Kierkegaard affirmed this to be the state of the self under paganism, of “natural man” either ignorant of or in denial of its relationship to God. Paganism accepted and even praised suicide as an honorable form of action, especially under the stoic code, an important theme in Percy’s fiction.7 Suicide represents the ultimate rebellion against God, the ultimate refusal to be a human self. The different forms of despair Kierkegaard described in the suicidal self range from passivity to trying to “become someone else” to a conscious and defiant refusal to be a “self under God.” The defiant self often becomes a “demoniac” self, possessed by resentment and rage against ordinary life, against the world and God.8 Finally, Kierkegaard insisted that the despair of the autonomous suicidal self (conscious rebellion against God) is sin. “Sin is potentiated weakness or potentiated defiance; sin is the potentiation of despair.” 9 On the other hand, if the self in despair acknowledges its true condition as a self under God, repents, and seeks forgiveness, a reversal can occur whereby the self can find faith and “salvation,” as we saw, potentially, in Raskolnikov and Dmitri Karamazov.10 However, for Kierkegaard the reversal cannot be brought about solely by human reason and will; it requires a “leap of faith.” Percy incorporated these themes into The Moviegoer, as we shall see.

6 Binx and Kate are metaphysical rebels who live in an anti-metaphysical culture, either ignorant of or unconcerned with questions about being, spirit or the soul, and immortality. It focuses on the immanent realities of everyday life. Everyday life, for most citizens in the culture, is shaped by the criteria of reason and science, which Percy regarded as a deformed ideology that has absorbed the modern mind and defrauded the genuine self. Binx and Kate are partly afflicted with this ideology, making their predicament doubly difficult. Living in an anti-metaphysical culture makes discovering oneself as “spirit transparently under God” seem well-nigh impossible, especially since the traditional signs of religious belief (language, rituals) have either 6. Ibid., 173. 7. Ibid., 179. 8. Ibid., 199–202. 9. Ibid., 208. 10. Ibid., 171–72.

156 

Walker Percy

been rejected or trivialized. They must find a way to live with integrity in such a culture, or, to use a favorite Percy trope, discover how to “stick themselves into the world.” Percy keynoted this theme by the first question Kate asks Binx in the novel: “How do you make your way in the world?” 11 Their predicament is also complicated by the fact that, in postmodern culture, the radical fissure between belief in the metaphysical order of reality (God, immortality, sin, salvation) and the ethical order (right action in the world) had become much wider and deeper than in Dostoevsky’s mid-nineteenthcentury Russia.12 Clues to discovering oneself “transparently under God” have become opaque in Binx and Kate’s world. So deep is the “fissure,” in fact, that it is possible, like Binx’s Cutrer relatives, to live an upright, ethical life without any serious thought of God or one’s spiritual self. But for Kierkegaard and Percy, to live an ethical life, honorable as it may be, is to avoid the task of becoming a fully human self “transparently under God.” What options are available to Binx and Kate as they face this predicament? One option, of course, is suicide. There is only one explicit reference to suicide in the novel. When Binx and Kate are riding the train to Chicago, Kate describes her anxiety about her life and her despair at not being understood by her family, especially her stepmother, Emily Cutrer. “They all think any minute I’m going to commit suicide,” she complains. “What a joke. The truth of course is the exact opposite. Suicide is the only thing that keeps me alive. Whenever everything else fails, all I have to do is consider suicide and in two seconds I’m as cheerful as a nitwit. But if I could not kill myself—ah, then I would. I can do without nembutol or murder mysteries but not without suicide.” 13 Behind Kate’s remark is Albert Camus’s famous statement in The Myth of Sisyphus: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide,” which Camus saw exemplified in Kirilov in Demons.14 Kate does overindulge on drugs and alcohol, but her depres11. Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), 43. All further references are to this edition. See also my chapter on the novel in John F. Desmond, Walker Percy’s Search for Community (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 41–80. 12. Percy, “The Fateful Rift: The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind,” in Signposts in a Strange Land, ed., introduction by Patrick Samway (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1991), 271–95. 13. Percy, Moviegoer, 194–95. 14. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Random House Vintage, 1959), 4.

The Moviegoer: Skirting the Abyss 

157

sion and self-destructive behavior are a protest against others’ misunderstandings and their attempts to mold her life rather than serious suicide attempts. Part of Kate’s problem is that she often traps herself by adopting an “objective” social scientist’s view of herself and others. To humor her, Binx pretends to share her view—“the camaraderie of a science that is not too objective to pity the folly and ignorance of the world.” 15 But her analytic stance soon collapses, and she is sunk in despair again. She then swings to the opposite extreme and adopts the role of romantic rebel inspired by her stepmother, Emily, a devotee of “books and music and art” and romantic “freedom.” 16 But this role-playing also fails, leaving her balanced over an “abyss,” quaking with anxiety and fear. Kate seriously considers committing suicide, but, as she and Binx realize, there are many other forms of suicide in their society, part of the cultural atmosphere Binx calls the “malaise,” being trapped in false role-playing, mundane routines, or “self”-consuming diversions.17 “Malaisans” ignore the inner spiritual call to become fully human selves. Passively accepting the life of a “malaisan” is for Percy an escape from the existential predicament. Like many of their contemporaries, Binx and Kate are prone to fall into these traps. Despite this, they recognize their predicament and share a bond of honesty that, in Binx’s case, recalls Prince Myshkin and Alyosha Karamazov. Binx’s tie to Alyosha, as we see later, is an important clue to understanding his final choice of a vocation. Binx’s predicament also echoes that of Dostoevsky’s underground man and Raskolnikov. The isolated underground man feels compelled to try to stick himself into the world by becoming a “man of action,” even though he thinks the ordinary man of action is unself-conscious and stupid. All of Percy’s male protagonists face a similar “call to action.” Binx’s first call to action comes in the opening scene when he is summoned by his Aunt Emily to discuss “the future and what I ought to do.” He immediately remembers 15. Percy, Moviegoer, 44–45. 16. Ibid., 45–46. 17. A distinction must be made between “everydayness” and living an ordinary life. Everydayness signifies a largely unconscious following out of daily routines without awareness of the metaphysical or transcendent reality. In contrast, commitment to the ordinary life is a self-conscious choice of an active life serving others in humility, a life consonant with St. Theresa’s “little way.”

158 

Walker Percy

the day when he was eight years old and his aunt told him his older brother Scott had died.18 Even though Binx was still a child, his aunt had already decided his future. “Scotty is dead. Now it’s all up to you. It’s going to be difficult for you but I know you’re going to act like a soldier.” 19 To “act like a soldier” is to assume the role of a heroic, honorable gentleman, a staple in the Southern male ethical-militarist code of behavior that informs his aunt’s morality. Binx describes her as “the female sport of a fierce old warrior gens.” This code was fulfilled by Binx’s “noble warrior” ancestors in World War I and by Binx’s father, killed before America entered the war when he was shot down by the Germans and crashed in Homer’s wine-dark sea with a copy of A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad in his pocket.20 Rene Girard has shown the historical roots of this code and its broader social and ethical implications for Percy. The gentlemanly code of “honorable” action is rooted in the tradition of the duel, which Clauswitz’s classic text, On War, demonstrated as a microcosm of the rationale for “honorable” war between nations.21 The duel as a test of gentlemanly honor and honorable action is an important theme in Dostoevsky’s fiction. Nicoli Stavrogin, Dmitri Karamazov, and even Father Zosima in his early career followed the code of the duelist as a test of honor. (Percy parodies this tradition in Lance Lamar’s mock “duel” and brutal murder of Janos Jacoby in Lancelot.) The Cutrer-Bolling tradition of honorable, gentlemanly action that Emily expects Binx to follow is an American version of that code. Emily’s code is in fact a pagan ethical standard of behavior. It makes little sense to a metaphysical rebel like Binx. Kierkegaard argued that such an ethical code is essentially the code of the Stoa, as did Percy.22 In “Stoicism in the South,” Percy argued that despite its nominal Christian trappings, the Southern aristocratic code of honor was Stoic and pagan and, implicitly, a code that manifests despair and a suicidal fatalism (as in Percy’s own family).23 Binx does “act like a soldier in Korea,” though he disliked the war and did not act he18. Percy, Moviegoer, 3–4. 19. Ibid., 4. 20. Ibid., 26, 25. 21. Rene Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoit Chantre, trans. Mary Baker (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012), chaps. 3–4, 53–109. 22. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 179–80. 23. Percy, “Stoicism in the South,” in Signposts, 83–89.

The Moviegoer: Skirting the Abyss 

159

roically. His most important experience in Korea was his awakening to the possibility of a “search” for existential meaning—a metaphysical search for a truer self. Binx (like Percy) renounces his deathly, stoical family heritage.24 When he returns from the war, Binx is distracted from his search by his addiction to money-making, girl-chasing, and moviegoing, the latter which fuels his attraction to the role of romantic hero embodied in film stars like Gregory Peck and Rory Calhoun, roles Binx tries out with his secretary, Sharon, and other women. Kate is not fooled by his role-playing. She recognizes this as escapism and warns Binx: “You’re like me, but worse. Much worse.” 25 Binx is “much worse” because, like Kate, he recognizes the threat of despair, but with his easygoing manner, he is in danger of simply accommodating himself to the deathly culture. Such spiritual sloth precludes rebellion. But deep inside, Binx knows that to either accept his aunt’s wishes for him or to “act” the “romantic hero” role would forfeit his quest for existential freedom and his search for a truer self. Initially, both he and Kate share a predicament like Dostoevsky’s underground man and Raskolnikov, though much less extreme. Percy signified this symbolic kinship by location. Binx lives in an underground apartment in Gentilly, like the underground man’s isolated corner and Raskolnikov’s dingy room, and when he visits his aunt’s house, he finds Kate in the basement cleaning old walls and cupboards.26 Percy elaborates other threats to Binx’s freedom and his search in addition to his aunt’s presumptuous attempt to order his life. Like Dostoevsky, Percy often used secondary characters to mirror different philosophical perspectives and options for how to “stick himself” in the world. For example, Binx sees that his Uncle Jules’s life is “an earthly paradise of money-making, easy friendships, old world charm and Negro retainers.” A nominal Catholic, Jules is sunk in the comfortable life of immanence with24. To my knowledge, Dostoevsky never named a metaphysical “search” as such, but the theme is certainly implied in the life of Alyosha Karamazov when the elder Zosima advises him to find his spiritual calling in the world rather than in the monastery and in the “new life” suggested for Raskolnikov and Sonya and Dmitri Karamazov and Grushenka, in their respective novels. 25. Percy, Moviegoer, 43. 26. In Dostoevsky and Existentialism (Lawrence, Kans.: Coronado, 1972), A. D. Menut argues that the early proposed title for “Notes from Underground” was “Notes from the Basement”; 14.

160 

Walker Percy

out metaphysical desire; he is so absorbed in the “City of Man” that “the City of God must hold little in store for him.” 27 The Cutrer’s black servant Mercer is no better off, having absorbed the positivist ideology to the point of complete confusion. He is trapped between his traditional role as house retainer, which he now sullenly resents, and his efforts to become “wellinformed in science and politics and to recreate himself by reading a book titled How to Harness Your Secret Powers.” The result? “His vision of himself dissolves as he sees himself as neither old retainer nor expert in current events.” Binx concludes, “The poor bastard.” 28 Binx’s other acquaintances are trapped in the despair of conformity, role-playing, and consumerism. His friend Walter Wade, Kate’s presumed fiancé, fashioned himself as an “arbiter of taste” in college; afterward, he continues in the role and is considered “a wonderful fella.” But privately he complains to Binx, “Oh Lord. What’s wrong with the goddam world, Binx?” 29 Binx’s cousin Nell Lovell and her husband, Eddie, a successful businessman, divert themselves by renovating old houses, both comfortable that they have “reexamined their values” and found them solid (middle- class, secular) and enduring. Listening to Eddie, Binx senses how “the fabric pulls together into one bright texture of investments, family projects, lovely old houses, little theater readings and such. It comes over me: this is how one lives!” 30 Binx sees despair under Eddie’s smooth surface. “No mystery here! He understands everything out there and everything out there is to be understood.” Later, when Binx hears Nell Lovell speak of their “solid” live and their “values,” he thinks “for some time the impression has been growing on me that everyone is dead.” When their chat ends, Binx drolly says, “We part laughing and dead,” reminiscent of Eliot’s narrator in “The Waste Land”: “I had not thought death had undone so many.” But for Dostoevsky and Percy, mystery, contradiction, and paradox are the enduring realities the self must confront. The greatest threat to Binx’s freedom and metaphysical search remains his formidable Aunt Emily, for whom he has much affection. As the 27. Percy, Moviegoer, 31. 28. Ibid., 23–24. 29. Ibid., 21, 39. 30. Ibid., 101, 18.

The Moviegoer: Skirting the Abyss 

161

Southern matriarch who is “both soldierly in look and manner,” she is as oblivious to Binx and Kate’s predicament as are her husband, Jules, and the Lovells. Stoic Emily “understands” the present world in terms of the classical Greek and Roman models in which she schooled the young Binx. Binx recognizes her despair, that though she believes that the social order is now collapsing into chaos, for her even the dissolution “makes sense.” Convinced that “in this world goodness is destined to be defeated,” Emily maintains that “a man must go down fighting. To do anything less is to be less than a man.” She enjoins Binx to “do his duty,” go to medical school, and “live a long, useful life serving my fellow man.” Binx is tempted by this ethical code, but he knows that such a life does not answer the deepest needs of the individual to undertake a personal search for meaning without preformulation. To capitulate to his aunt’s wishes or her fatalism would be a “suicidal” defrauding of his truest self. Binx’s interior search is carried out beneath a surface of affability, humor, and polite bonhomie. Outwardly, he is an easygoing successful bond salesman and heir-apparent to the Bolling-Cutrer tradition, but inwardly he is a loner, an exile or “castaway” half-alienated from the culture. The Bolling family history offers important clues to his predicament. In addition to a talent for science, Binx has inherited his father’s restlessness and “wandering desire.” Life as an “objective” scientist-doctor did not satisfy his father’s restlessness. Feeling “left over” from his career, he soon fell victim to a romantic fatalism that drove him to rebel against “everydayness” and become a “man of action.” He “finds himself” by going “happily” to war and being shot down by the Germans. For Binx, his father’s “heroic” but suicidal act is a sign of the deathly impulse in Western culture that Percy saw manifested in the fratricidal killing by “honorable gentlemen” on both sides in World War I.31 Thinking of his father’s fate, Binx laments, “Oh the crap that lies lurking in the English soul. Somewhere it, the English soul, received an injection of romanticism that nearly killed it. That’s what killed my father, English romanticism, that and 1930’s science.” What Binx calls “1930s science” is scientism, an ideology totally antithetical to the existentialist view of life. 31. See Percy’s comments on World War I in Lawson and Kramer, eds., More Conversations with Walker Percy (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993), 30–31.

162 

Walker Percy

Binx recognizes how this antinomy defeated his father. “A line from my notebook: Explore the connection between romanticism and scientific objectivity. Does a scientifically minded person become a romantic because he is left over from his own science?” 32 Here, Percy extends Dostoevsky’s critique of the reason and science ideology by linking it directly to the romantic reaction to scientism’s threat of objectifying the self. Recalling his father’s fate gives Binx important clues to his own predicament; he knows that he has imbibed the same restlessness, ideological views, and romantic longing as his father. But Binx’s quiet rebellion against this paternal legacy runs the opposite risk of living a life completely alienated from the ordinary world. Rebellion alone is a dead-end, a denial of his humanity as well as that of others, risking madness and literal or spiritual suicide. Nevertheless, Binx adopted the ideology of reason and science in an attempt to reveal the mysteries of life. He undertook a “vertical search,” reading “fundamental books” about “the solution of the problem of time, Schroedinger’s What Is Life?, Einstein’s The World as I See It and The Chemistry of Life. But after reading these books, Binx soon realizes that “though the universe had been disposed of I myself was left over.” 33 Shocked by the sense of alienation his scientific mastery of the universe has brought him, Binx abandons the vertical search in favor of what he calls a “horizontal search” into the mysteries of ordinary, everyday experience. Clues to his predicament and how to live must be discovered in the quotidian world, not in abstract theory. “What is important is what I shall find when I leave my room and wander in the neighborhood. Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and read as a diversion.” 34 Binx’s shift to an existential horizontal search and away from the abstract scientific search marks an important turning point in his life. However, Binx’s description of his predicament in terms of a split between vertical and horizontal perspectives reveals what Percy saw as a Cartesian “split” within the postmodern self in general, which in Love in the Ruins Dr. Tom More calls “angelism/ bestialism.” Dostoevsky also represented this phenomenon in the underground man and in Raskolnikov, Kirilov, and Ivan Karamazov. 32. Percy, Moviegoer, 88. 33. Ibid., 69–70. 34. Ibid., 70.

The Moviegoer: Skirting the Abyss 

163

Although Binx continues to be plagued by his inner conflict between thought and action, he remains open to the possibilities of mystery, especially religious mystery. This mystery is dramatized in his relationship to his half-brother, Lonnie Smith. Like that of Sonya Marmeladov, Lonnie’s faith points to a reconciliation of the vertical and horizontal perspectives through belief in Jesus’ incarnation, death, and resurrection as the inter­ section of the two coordinates of the vertical (transcendent) and horizontal (earthly) in the person of the God-man, Christ. This metaphysical and mystical union is specified for Catholic Lonnie by belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, which is the central topic in Binx and Lonnie’s conversation.35 Percy’s playful development of this scene has led some readers to view their talk as simply a case of the affable Binx “playing along” with the sick Lonnie’s religious talk to mollify him. But the substance of their colloquy is deadly serious. Though not an orthodox believer, Binx responds honestly by trying to help assuage Lonnie’s guilt over his envy of his dead brother, Duval, and by advising him to “concentrate on the Eucharist” instead. In turn, Lonnie will offer his communion for Binx, a loving gesture that Binx gracefully accepts. Binx remains open to a reciprocal love and communion of the spirit with children and adolescents, like Alyosha and Myshkin. Binx does not find Lonnie’s words to be worn out. They communicate in a secret language of love while discussing the most serious spiritual matters. Binx’s bond with Lonnie and his care for Kate reveal his capacity for love, what Percy called an “intersubjective relationship.” Faith, Kierkegaard insisted, is subjective. Binx’s love for Lonnie connects his search to his loving half-brother’s faith in the mysterious absent God and to Christ; his love for Kate links his search to the concrete demands of love and Christian charity toward others. Binx is often distracted from the search he discovered in wartime Korea. For a while he tries to embrace the same scientific approach to the world as his father by doing lab research on the renal function of pigs. (His Aunt Emily believes he should pursue a career in research, while his mother, Mrs. Smith, believes his physician father “should have been in research.”)36 But working in the lab, Binx soon becomes entranced by the 35. Ibid., 163–65. 36. Ibid., 154.

164 

Walker Percy

mystery of the “here and now”—the afternoon sunlight, the creaking of the old building, and the sounds of students playing football outside. He soon abandons his research and swings to the opposite romantic pole, leaving “in quest of the spirit of summer and in the company of an attractive and confused girl from Bennington who fancied herself a poet.” 37 His romantic quest represents the equally deadly option of becoming a wistful dreamer forever searching for the ideal reality beyond the mysterious “here and now.” What saves him from both these extremes and anchors him in the present is his religious sense, his intuition that his restlessness and deepest “heart’s desire” may have their source in the author of all being, God, suggested by his relationship to the Jews and the God of history. Binx has no use for the traditional, rational explanations of God. “I could never make head or tail of God. The proofs of God’s existence may have been true for all I know, but it didn’t make the slightest difference. In fact, I have only to hear the word God and a curtain comes down in my head.” 38 Although he rejects the “God of the philosophers,” Binx is deeply interested in his connection to the Jews, the historical link to the mysterious God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus. Binx proclaims his “Jewishess” and special kinship with the chosen people. “We share the same exile. I accept my exile. The Jews are my first real clue.” 39 A clue to what? the reader asks. They are a clue to Binx’s sense of his immediate predicament as an “exile” like the Jews, in an essentially pagan or post-Christian culture. (Later, he compares his fellow exile and fiancée, Kate, to Rachel, the spiritual mother of all Hebrews.) Binx declares that when a despairing man without a search passes a Jew in the street, he “notices nothing.” Similarly, when an artist or scientist passes a Jew, the Jew appears to him abstractly as only another artist or scientist. But when a man “awakens to the possibility of a search” and passes a Jew on the street, “he is like Robinson Crusoe seeing the footprint on the beach.” 40 Identifying himself as an exiled Jew 37. Ibid., 52. 38. Ibid., 145. 39. Ibid., 89. 40. Ibid.; Percy, “The Message in the Bottle,” in The Message in the Bottle (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), 119–50. Binx’s self-identification with the exiled Jews marks a crucial difference between his thought and that of Dostoevsky on the meaning of the Jews in history. In general, Percy followed the traditional Western understanding

The Moviegoer: Skirting the Abyss 

165

enables Binx to resist the despair that comes from abandoning the search in favor of using religion as a comforting defense against the shocks of life. For example, his mother, shattered by the death of her favorite son, Duval, adopts a “radical distrust” of the world by her “election of the ordinary. No more heart’s desire for her. She has wanted everything colloquial and easy, even God.” Binx concludes, dismally, that “my father’s family thinks that the world makes sense without God and that anyone but an idiot knows what the good life is and anyone but a scoundrel can lead it.”41 His family (except Lonnie) and his Aunt Emily believe that one can lead an ethical life and ignore the “heart’s desire,” the restless longing for God described in St. Augustine’s Confessions and in Pascal’s Pensees. Binx gets caught up in immediate problems and is tempted to abandon his search, until some crisis awakens him to recommitment. Paradoxically, the “absence” of God serves as an ironic inducement to renew the search, in hope. Remember Tomorrow Starting point for the search. It no longer avails to start with creatures and prove God. Yet it is impossible to rule God out. of the Jews as the unique chosen people of God and the font of the Christian faith. Dostoevsky’s view of the Jews is more complex, and full discussion of it is beyond the scope of this study. However, certain key points can be made. First, Dostoevsky’s anti-Semitic attitudes have been well documented, as well as his vigorous attempts to defend himself against the charges in A Writer’s Diary (trans., annotated Kenneth Lantz, introductory study Gary Saul Morson, 2 vols. [Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993–94]) and elsewhere. The charges against him hold that his attitude toward “the Jews” follows the stereotypical nineteenth-century caricature of them as materialistic worshippers of Mammon, as financial exploiters and social parasites who constituted a “state within a state,” loyal only to their own tribe and not to any nation. He also accused them, along with the Catholic Church in the West, of promoting socialism as part of their predatory aims. He believed, as we have seen, that Christianity in the West was dying because of its betrayal of the true Christ when it aligned the church with temporal political power. The “Jews,” with their financial power, were in his view implicated in this betrayal. For Dostoevsky the Orthodox believer, Russia is the true “God-bearing nation” whose historical destiny is to resurrect a genuine Christian faith and save mankind. His view of Russia’s destiny combined Slavophil nationalism and millenarianism. Western Christianity and “the Jews” were cast as implacable enemies of this destiny. For an excellent discussion of this issue, see David I. Goldstein’s Fyodor Dostoevsky and the Jews (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). 41. Percy, Moviegoer, 142, 146.

166 

Walker Percy

The only possible starting point: the strange face of one’s own invincible apathy—that if the proofs were proved and God presented himself, nothing would be changed. Here is the strangest fact of all. Abraham saw signs of God and believed. Now the only sign is that all the signs in the world make no difference. Is that God’s ironic revenge? But I am onto Him.42

6 Binx’s search and his longing for love are focused specifically on his amorous quest for women and his relationship with Kate. Percy’s exploration of the erotic-sexual aspect of Binx and Kate’s relationship represents a significant broadening and deepening of Dostoevsky’s treatment of male-female relationships. As Rowan Williams clearly demonstrated, the subcurrent of intense erotic relations is important throughout Dostoevsky’s novels and short stories.43 But given the cultural and literary constraints of the time, plus censorship rules, he could not explore these relationships as explicitly as Percy did in his novels, particularly in Lost in the Cosmos. More precisely, in these works Percy examined how sexual dysfunction in postmodern erotic relationships is a sign of the general disorder in postmodern consciousness and in male-female relationships. As we saw, he regarded Quentin Compson’s suicide over his sister Caddie’s loss of virginity (and his failure as a man of honor to avenge her disgrace) as symptomatic of “the failure of the post-modern consciousness to come to terms with sexuality.” 44 In Lost in the Cosmos Percy explored in depth the demoniac self’s attempt to “reenter” the world through sexual intercourse and violence.45 Percy’s insights in Cosmos are clearly anticipated by Dostoevsky’s portrayal of sexual violence in the underground man, Svidrigalov, Stavrogin, Totsky, Fyodor Karamazov, and others. In the midst of one of Kate’s earlier crises, Binx proposed marriage to her, a serious offer though delivered in an almost offhand way.46 But on the 42. Ibid., 146. 43. Rowan Williams, Language, Faith and Fiction (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2008), 172–80. 44. Lewis P. Simpson, Imagining Our Time: Recollections and Reflections on American Writing, introduction Fred Hobson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007), 224. 45. Percy, Lost in the Cosmos (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), 175–98. 46. Percy, Moviegoer, 119.

The Moviegoer: Skirting the Abyss 

167

train ride to Chicago they become trapped in the netherworld of postmodern sexual malaise. They fall victim to what Binx calls the “peculiar gnosis of trains,” that is, a kind of pseudo-transcendent milieu that seems to free them from the actualities of space and time. The train becomes a kind of placeless place where the riders seem to escape the malaise of “everydayness.” But psychologically, Binx and Kate are still caught in their particular forms of malaise: Binx anxiously dreading the Chicago trip and worried about Kate’s emotional fragility and desperation to find someone to order her life. In this Gnostic bubble the two loners act out their failed sexual tryst. Again, like Dostoevsky, Percy uses minor characters portrayed satirically to link Binx and Kate’s personal crisis to the broader cultural malaise. Binx recalls attending a book signing by Dr. and Mrs. Bob Dean, coauthors of Technique in Marriage, a popular sex manual typical of the mechanistic, pseudoscientific approach to sexual relations favored by behaviorists. In the Deans’s approach, the mystery of sexual desire is reduced to physical, sensory manipulation as a way to “maximize performance.” Their objectivist-“scientific” approach to sex is linked to the larger issue of the culture’s indoctrination in the “objective” approach when Binx observes a passenger from St. Louis reading a newspaper article about the future of nuclear energy that proclaims “the gradual convergence of the physical and social sciences” for the betterment of mankind, the utopian dream of many secular humanists and scientists. Binx sees such utopianism as despair. The train journey soon triggers an acute crisis in Kate. Binx sees that she is desperate to move her life off “dead center” and is panicky because “she longs to be an anyone who is anywhere and she cannot”; Kate cannot escape her actual, concrete self. During a brief stop in Jackson, she turns romantic and rhapsodizes over the beauty of the moonlit capitol building, but Binx sees the danger of such romanticizing, as did Dmitri Karamazov earlier. “I try to steer her away from beauty. Beauty is a whore.” 47 In her panic and despair, Kate turns to Binx for support and guidance. 47. Ibid., 196. As I noted, Binx’s comment echoes that of Dmitri Karamazov and reveals Dostoevsky’s rejection of Shiller’s romanticism and the nineteenth-century cult of romantic beauty; see Frank, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 310–11; 649–52; Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans., annotated Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 108. Binx’s rejection of beauty as a goal also recalls Kierkegaard’s rejection of what he regarded as “aesthetic damnation”; see Luschei, Sovereign Wayfarer, 77.

168 

Walker Percy

She fears that his marriage proposal is only “another one of (his) deathhouse pranks.” She is afraid marriage to Binx may mean that they will end up like the Lovells, trapped in the deathly boredom of middle-class life. It is precisely at this point that she mentions the possibility of suicide as “the only thing that keeps her alive.” Despite this possible choice, Kate says she “believes in” Binx, calls him “the unmoved mover” (an ironic surrogate God with authority), and agrees to marry him and “do what you tell me.” 48 Kate acknowledges her need for help, Binx’s help, to negotiate the crises in her daily life.49 She mistakenly thinks that he is “not religious,” unaware of his private search for the signs of the God he says he is “on to.” For his part, Binx knows that his marriage to Kate would mean the end of his comfortable life in Gentilly. But he remains steadfast in his commitment, and when he reassures her, she gives him a “passionate kiss” and proposes that they return to his “coffin”-like roomette for “a little fling.” Caught in another swing in her dialectic, Kate turns from the romance of abstract Beauty to the immanence of sexual intercourse, claiming that “when all is said and done” it is “the real thing.” As Luschei points out, this planned tryst would parody the mechanical “technique” promoted by Dr. and Mrs. Bob Dean.50 Binx tries to accommodate Kate, but their mutual failure in the encounter only brings added estrangement rather than a genuine union of lovers. Percy made clear in an interview that their failure was not physical; rather, it was spiritual.51 That is, Binx and Kate’s attempted sexual union 48. Percy, Moviegoer, 193, 194, 197. 49. Kate’s admission of her need for help from a person of authority is a recognition of her dependence on others for spiritual guidance, which for Kierkegaard is a sign of one’s humility and true humanity. For him, the ultimate Other or Authority, which he calls the “Power,” is God and the God-man, Christ. Percy arrived at a similar conclusion in his discussion of the castaway’s need for “news” from beyond the island in “Message in the Bottle.” “News” of salvation must come from an authoritative apostle, a newsbearer, a concept derived from Kierkegaard’s essay “The Difference between a Genius and an Apostle,” in Soren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vol 2, F–K, ed., trans, Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, assisted by Gregor Malantschuk (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1970), 82. In Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov and Demons (trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, introduction by Joseph Frank [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000]), the elder monks Zosima and Tikhon serve analogous roles as authoritative spiritual figures, as does Fr. Rinaldo Smith in Percy, The Thanatos Syndrome (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987). 50. Percy, Moviegoer, 198, 98–99. 51. Lawson and Kramer, Conversations with Walker Percy, 68.

The Moviegoer: Skirting the Abyss 

169

was undermined by anxiety, fear, and dread when faced with the act. Fear of failure brings failure, and not “the real thing.” Their sexual failure also undermines Binx’s fantasy of fulfilling the role of romantic hero. As he admits to his celluloid hero, Rory Calhoun, he could neither act the honorable gentleman who rejects the heroine’s offer of sex nor play the adventure-seeker role of one who journeys east, finds the “Real Right Thing, and—in a perfect marriage of spirit and flesh”—is able to sexually oblige “a maid who comes to him with a heart full of longing.” 52 Binx admits that “flesh, poor flesh failed us.” Here, the word “flesh” does not simply mean the physical “body.” Rather, as in St. Paul and Kierkegaard, “flesh” means natural man, not “spiritual” man understood as a union of the eternal/spiritual and temporal/physical, as one aware of himself “transparently under God.” Binx’s realizes the spiritual significance of their sexual failure. “The burden was too great and flesh poor flesh, neither hallowed by sacrament nor despised by spirit (for despairing is not the worst fate to overtake the flesh), but until this moment seen through and canceled, rendered null and void by the cold and fishy eye of the malaise—flesh poor flesh now at this moment summoned all at once to be all and everything, end all and be all, the last and only hope—quails and flails.” 53 Their sexual failure gives Binx a fundamental insight into his own and the age’s predicament. Attempting to discover “the real thing” through the “flesh” of sexual intercourse, Binx is thwarted by his own self-awareness, “the cold and fishy eye of the malaise.” The failed attempt exposes his riven character—self-awareness “separated” from the body—and renders him spiritually impotent before the act. Binx’s failure is symptomatic of the general sexual malaise in postmodern America. In the broader culture, Percy implies, sexual liberation and enslavement to the orgasm as performance reveals the desacralization of the sex act and spiritual impotence. Self-consciousness, deformed by allegiance to technique alone, undermines the spiritual dimension of the act. Binx sees that actions neither “hallowed by sacrament nor despised by spirit” are acts of despair, without any moral/spiritual meaning. But his failure and subsequent recognition are nonetheless liberating. “What an 52. Percy, Moviegoer, 199–200. 53. Ibid., 200.

170 

Walker Percy

experience, Rory, to be free of it for once. Rassled out. What a sickness it is, Rory, this latter-day post-Christian sex. To be pagan it would be one thing, an easement taken easily in a rosy old pagan world; to be Christian it would be another thing, fornication forbidden and not even to be thought of in the new life. But to be neither pagan nor Christian but this: oh this is sickness, Rory.” 54 Through Binx, Percy delivers an anathema on the American obsession with sex as the “be all and end all,” which renders sin meaningless. Christians talk about the horror of sin, but they are overlooking something. They keep talking as if everyone is a great sinner, when the truth is that hardly anyone is up to it. There is very little sin in the depth of the malaise. The highest moment in a malaisians life can be that moment when he manages to sin like a proper human (Look at us, Binx—my vagabond friends as good as cried to me—we’re sinning! We’re human! We’re succeeding! We’re human after all!)55

Binx’s speech—and Percy’s vision here—is deeply rooted in Kierkegaard’s understanding of despair and sin.56 For Kierkegaard, sin is spiritual, a self-conscious, willed offense against God. The sinner in despair is one who knows that he can only realize his true being “transparently under God,” and yet refuses. The sin of despair is “not to will to be oneself transparently under God.” 57 God is the measure of his sin of despair. Under Christianity, his predicament is not to be confused with that of an unaware pagan. In paganism, man is the measure, not God. The pagan in despair does not sin in the Christian sense. Rather, he suffers from fatalism. For Kierk­egaard, sins of the “flesh” are “an assertion of the lower self”; sin as despair is “when the spirit consents to the wildness of flesh and blood.” 58 Kierkegaard’s distinction sheds light on Binx’s wry observation that “there is very little sin in the depths of the malaise.” In the postmodern mind, there is little consciousness of sin as despair of selfhood or as a willed offense against God. In a malaise-ridden culture, as Dostoevsky predicted, there is “no crime and no sin.” Significantly, Binx and Kate’s failed tryst 54. Ibid., 207. 55. Ibid., 200–201. 56. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and the Sickness unto Death, 210–13. 57. Ibid., 212. 58. Ibid., 212–13.

The Moviegoer: Skirting the Abyss 

171

ends with ironic echoes of suicide from Hamlet (Ophelia’s song) and Eliot’s The Waste Land: “Good night, sweet Whipple, good night, good night, good night.” 59 But Binx and Kate’s sexual failure marks a crucial turning point in his life. Despite their misadventure on the train, Binx has committed himself to marry and care for the unstable Kate. His commitment to Kate liberates him from his fantasies of romantic questing for other women. When they arrive in Wilmette, he sees a bevy of “noble Midwestern girls” with “clear eyes” and “splendid butts,” but has “never a thought of them.” In contrast, he sees Kate “plainly for the first time” since he was wounded in Korea and first awakened to the search. Binx sees Kate as like “a dark little Rachel,” identifying her with his deeper search for meaning as an “exiled Jew.” Though Binx seems to have escaped the trap of romantic sexual fantasizing, he is still threatened on another front: the malaise of the pervasive “genie-soul of Chicago” that “flaps down like a buzzard.” The buzzard image is appropriate, since the “genie-soul” of the city where Binx is zapped by “five million personal rays of Chicagoans” represents the threatened death of anonymity in this bustling, progressive city in the American heartland. One key to Binx’s fearful reaction to Chicago lies in his memory of two earlier trips to the city, first to visit the “Century of Progress” exhibition with his father and brother Scott, and later to see the World Series. The Century of Progress exhibition was the central attraction of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933–34, built to display the achievements of secular autonomous man. Its theme was technological revolution and it featured a visit of Germany’s Grand Zeppelin, futuristic “dream cars,” homes of tomorrow, and the streamliner Zephyr train. The first major league All-Star Game, an iconic American event, was held in Comisky Park. The Bollings also visited the underground pool where Johnny Weissmuller, the famous American athlete cum movie star (Tarzan), swam, and the exhibit of a Stone Age family (natural man) at the Field Museum. But Binx’s deepest memory is of the failure of a bonding relationship between father and son longed for by his father. Binx refused the threatening, intimate role of being his father’s “companion” and “buddy,” intuiting it as a threat to his personal freedom. 59. Ibid., 201.

172 

Walker Percy

Implicitly, he had already begun to distance himself from the old patrician code represented by his father and the other Bollings. The Century of Progress exhibition, as I have said, represents an American equivalent of the Crystal Palace in Notes from Underground, a symbol of the utopian belief that the application of reason and science would transform society and bring about universal well-being and happiness. As we saw, the Crystal Palace was the centerpiece of the Great Exhibition of London in 1851; its fourteen thousand exhibits featured the latest technology of the Industrial Revolution. Dostoevsky visited it in 1862. In Notes, Dostoevsky attacked the secular utopian ideal represented by the Crystal Palace because it was based on a materialistic determinism “involving the total elimination of personality.” 60 For Dostoevsky, such “progress” would undermine the individual’s free will and right to a personal, spiritual destiny. Now returned to Chicago with Kate, Binx recognizes the threat of anonymity in the great emptiness of “the wind and space” that is the genie-soul of the city, canopied by the “nakedest, loneliest sky” of the Midwest. They escape temporarily into the underground “cave” of a “death-house” theater to watch a movie, but Binx soon feels overwhelmed by the stifling vastness of the city and determines to return home to New Orleans the next day. Their return to New Orleans at the end of Mardi Gras and the beginning of Lent, the penitential season, marks a movement toward repentance and self-discovery that echoes the penitential turns of Raskolnikov’s penitential move in the Epilogue to Crime and Punishment, Trofimovich’s “resurrection” at the end of The Idiot, Shatov’s transformation in Demons, and Dmitri Karamazov’s conversion at the end of The Brothers Karamazov. Binx must face the “ominous objectivity” and wrath of his Aunt Emily. In a long speech, Emily registers her disgust with Binx for, she incorrectly infers, his having taken Kate to Chicago “not twelve hours after (she) attempted suicide” and for probably attempting to seduce her.61 More broadly, she believes Binx has failed her by not living up to the Stoic moral code of honorable gentlemansoldier she has tried to impose on him. That such a role is outmoded and spiritually fatal for Binx is signaled by the fact that throughout her long indictment of Binx he fixes his attention on her bent, sword-like letter 60. Frank, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 217. 61. Percy, Moviegoer, 61.

The Moviegoer: Skirting the Abyss 

173

opener, a comic reference to the old “broad-sword” values she represents. Outside, a chimney cleaner cries that the chimney of the ancestral Cutrer house needs a thorough cleaning. Binx’s fatalistic aunt is completely incapable of understand his relationship to Kate or the age. Instead, she imperiously condemns Western civilization: “Our moral fiber is rotten. Our national character stinks to heaven.” Wisely, Binx offers no defense to his aunt, no rational “excuse” for his behavior. Sensing her failure, Emily dismisses him with a smile that “marks an ending” to her efforts to control his life.62 After leaving his aunt’s house, Binx is stricken with panic and founders again into a fit of longing and sensual desire. He has reached the nadir point of despair. Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before, having only to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies—smelling merde in every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred per cent of people are humanists and ninety-nine per cent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead. . . . I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire.63

Feeling that his search has been abandoned—“It is no match for my aunt, her rightness and her despair, her despairing of me and her despairing of herself”—Binx says his only recourse is to “find a girl,” like the underground man’s need to escape alienation by finding “a girl,” the prostitute Lisa, and demonstrate his power “to act” through sexual conquest. But Binx fails when he calls his secretary, Sharon, for a date; she is already engaged to be married. It seems “the end of the world” as he spins aimlessly on the “ocean wave” playground carrousel, until a “girl” does arrive—Kate— who will help to rescue him, and he her, from suicidal despair. As is well known, Percy acknowledged his debt to Dostoevsky in writing 62. Ibid., 223, 226. 63. Ibid., 228.

174 

Walker Percy

the ending of The Moviegoer.64 In The Brothers Karamazov, Alyosha tells Kolya and the young friends of the dead boy Ilyusha that in the afterlife they shall all rise from the dead and be together, and that Ilyusha will be whole again.65 His assurance affirms the immortality and the resurrection of the body. Binx gives the same assurance to the Smith children after Lonnie dies. When Donice asks him, “When Our Lord raises us up on the last day, will Lonnie still be in a wheelchair or will he be like us?” Binx answers, “He’ll be like you.” Binx’s affirmation is, like that of Alyosha, a clear sign of his abiding religious consciousness.66 Moreover, Binx’s choice of a vocation parallels that of Alyosha as well. Alyosha had originally hoped to become a monk in the monastery. But Father Zosima tells him that his true calling is to live in the world, helping others in love and charity. So is Binx’s vocation. When Kate asks him after his final interview with his aunt what he plans to do, Binx replies, “There is only one thing I can do: listen to people, see how they stick themselves into the world, hand them along a ways in their dark journey and be handed along, for good and selfish reasons.” 67 Binx’s decision resolves his dilemma of “how to stick himself into the world.” His choice, like Alyosha’s, follows from Father Zosima’s belief that “all are responsible for all.” He will live a humble, ordinary life in service to others, the Christian “little way,” neither grandiose nor extraordinary. He will go to medical school as his aunt wishes, but not to fulfill her plan for him. His choice is made in freedom. Kierkegaard affirmed that freedom is “a category of consciousness”; that is, what primarily matters is not the outward form it takes, but rather the inner, hidden intention: here, Binx’s stated plan to help others along in their journey and be helped as well. He chooses a humble life of service to others, a choice made in openness to the world. In his commitment to love and care for Kate and to help others, he abandons the underground of escapism and diversion, rejects the conformity he sees in others, and chooses to continue his search with Kate, in hope, humor, and good spirits. 64. Lawson and Kramer, Conversations with Walker Percy, 66. 65. Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 776. 66. Percy, Moviegoer, 240, 19. 67. Ibid., 233.

The Moviegoer: Skirting the Abyss 

175

Chap ter 9 The Last Gentleman Homeward Bound

Speaking of his second novel, The Last Gentleman, Percy explicitly acknowledged his debt to Dostoevsky when he said that his protagonist, young Will Barrett, “bears a conscious kinship to Prince Myshkin. He has a passionate pilgrimage he must follow, and he is looking for a father figure.” He added that “Barrett is consciously placed in Kierkegaard’s religious mode. He is what Gabriel Marcel calls a wayfarer—like an old-fashioned pilgrim on a quest.” 1 Percy’s remark points to a complicated set of influences at work in his shaping of Will Barrett and his pilgrimage. Suffice it to say at this point that they help reveal the broader significance Percy intended for Barrett’s quest. As I have noted about many of Percy’s characters, Barrett is both an individual character and a representative type, and as such, he is partly shaped by the intellectual currents and the competing ideologies and beliefs of his own times—the America of the 1960s. As a man of his times, Barrett’s predicament is unique, but it also reflects a spiritual kinship with similar predicaments described in Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard. One important aspect of that uniqueness is that since Percy claimed to have cast him in Kierkegaard’s religious mode, Will’s quest becomes a spiritual via negativa in which he confronts and rejects the dominant ideologies of the day and discovers, through trial and error, a greater sense of who he truly 1. Lewis A. Lawson and Victor A. Kramer, eds., Conversations with Walker Percy (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985), 13.

176

is and of how to act with freedom in the world. At a deeper level, his quest is a quixotic interior journey through memory in the manner of St. Augustine, as described by Charles Taylor in Sources of the Self.2 In the novel, Percy also further developed ideas and themes from Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard as part of his own development as a novelist after writing The Moviegoer. Two important developments particularly stand out and will be the focus of this chapter. One is his more explicitly detailed analysis of the relationship between dysfunctional sexual relations and suicide, examined mainly through Dr. Sutter Vaught. Sutter’s analysis expands upon Binx Bolling’s discussion of American sexual mores and sin after his failed tryst with Kate on the train to Chicago, but it also looks back to Dostoevsky’s underground man and to Svidrigalov and Stavrogin. At the same time, Percy’s development of the sexuality-suicide theme extends far beyond Dostoevsky’s treatment of this theme, as we shall see. The second major theme is Percy’s deeper exploration of the self’s search for a viable authority or “father figure.” The pattern expands upon Binx’s search for a model to imitate as he tries to find a way to “stick himself” into the world. But it also reflects back to the role of authority figures in Dostoevsky’s novels—seen in the roles of Porfiry, the elder Zosima, and Bishop Tikhon—and to the failed quest of fatherless figures like the underground man, Prince Myshkin, Pyotr Verkovensky, Stavrogin, and Ivan Karamazov. Likewise, Percy developed Kierkegaard’s notion of the eternal, divine Authority (God) and the God-man Christ as a model of the ideal human self, also expressed by Dostoevsky and personified in The Last Gentleman by the religious Val Vaught (Sr. Johnette Mary Vianney) and Father Boomer.3 Combining these two major themes through his characterization of Dr. Vaught, Percy made the disgraced physician a pivotal figure in Barrett’s search for a viable authority/father figure, though in the end Will rejects the renegade doctor’s suicidal despair.

6 2. Charles Taylor, “In Interiore Homine,” in Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 127–42. 3. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death, trans., introduction Walter Lowrie (1941; repr. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955), 171–74; see also Fyodor Dostoevsky’s statement on belief in Christ as the ideal model for the human personality in Dostoevsky’s Occasional Writings, trans., introduction David Magarshack (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 305–6.

 

The Last Gentleman: Homeward Bound 

177

As the novel opens, Barrett is described as an “addled” young man without a true sense of self. He is not sure who he is or what he is supposed to do with his life, a condition of spiritual malaise Percy attributed to most contemporary Americans. Will is a displaced Southerner living in New York City and working as a humidification engineer in the basement of Macy’s department store. His “underground” existence obviously recalls Binx and Kate’s first habitat as well as that of Dostoevsky’s underground man. But unlike Binx, Will is not a metaphysical rebel; as Percy said, he is “worse off” than Binx. Younger and more naïve, he lacks Binx’s sophisticated self-consciousness, humor, and ironic voice, the latter taken over in The Last Gentleman by the satiric, third-person narrator. Will has no immediate family; his father committed suicide, and he almost never mentions his mother, who is presumably also dead. Will’s lack of an integral family may suggest a similar theme in Dostoevsky’s fiction, such as his treatment of the broken family in Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov, as Rowan Williams has shown.4 Will suffers from amnesia, attacks of déjà-vu, and fugue states so disorienting that he often awakens to find himself in strange cities or wandering aimlessly across Civil War battlefields. His chronic physical and psychical disabilities bear some likeness to several of Dostoevsky’s disturbed characters, such as Raskolnikov, Stavrogin, Smerdyakov, and especially Prince Myshkin. Also unlike Binx, Will has no interest in “the Jews” or in searching for a hidden God, though his search is in a real sense “religious,” as we shall see. Rather, his search is, as Percy said, for a father-figure, someone with authority who can tell him how to live. But as an engineer committed to the ideology of reason and science as a way to engineer his life successfully, Will’s concern is mainly with immanent realities. Mystery, especially the mystery of conflicted human desire, is for him a stumbling block he cannot engineer by reason alone, though he tries. As the ironic narrator says, “He had to know everything before he could do anything”; thus he “had trouble ruling out the possible.” 5 To carefully premeditate action in this way often induces paralysis before the act, leaving Will in Kierkegaard’s realm of 4. See Rowan Williams’s analysis of the broken family in Dostoevsky’s stories in Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2008), 115, 163, 178–79. 5. Walker Percy, The Last Gentleman (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), 4.

178 

Walker Percy

“pure possibility.” 6 As the novel opens, his identity is so formless that he is inclined to either observe the world from a detached point of view and wait for something to happen or else try to join society by imitating others—that is, by role-playing. Will thinks that “something is wrong with him” (rather than the culture) but does not know what or why. He tries psychoanalysis under the authority of Dr. Gamov but finds no answers and finally quits. On the other hand, he has excellent “radar,” keen powers of observation and intuition, qualities that often give him superior insight but that paradoxically also reinforce his sense of alienation from others. In short, as Percy believes, like most Americans Will suffers the fracturing effects of postmodern consciousness without being aware of it. Apropos this condition, and again like most Americans, Will is confused, anxious, and fearful when it comes to intimate sexual relations.

6 Percy’s double claim that Will bears a “conscious kinship” with Prince Myshkin and that he created Will in Kierkegaard’s “religious mode” must be qualified. As we have already seen, Myshkin is not on a “passionate pilgrimage” on a search for a father-figure, as Will is. What they do share in common is their quest for love with a woman—Will’s infatuation with Kitty Vaught and Myshkin’s platonic relationship with Natasha Filippovna or Aglaya Epauchin—and for a place and role in society. They also share a certain naivete, an openness and honesty with others. The question of their relationship to the “religious” is more complicated. Myshkin, as I have argued, is an ironic and failed Christ figure, and in an important speech I discussed earlier, he explicitly affirms the Christian faith held by the Russian peasantry.7 This faith is manifested in part by Myshkin’s benevolent words and actions throughout the novel. For his part, Will Barrett never affirms any particular religious faith; he is ignorant of or baffled by the mystery of faith represented by Sr. Johnette Vianney and, later, by Father Boomer. In what sense can Will’s pilgrimage be called religious? Kierkegaard 6. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death, 168–75. 7. See Prince Myshkin’s comments on the Christian belief of the Russian peasantry in Dostoevsky, The Idiot, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, introduction Richard Pevear (New York: Vintage, 2003), 219–21.

The Last Gentleman: Homeward Bound 

179

insisted that the religious mode always involves a movement of transcendence. For him, the religious seeker comes to make a leap of faith in the face of the absurd, as Abraham did in accepting God’s command to sacrifice his son and heir, Isaac. Percy adopted Kierkegaard’s general notion of the religious seeker to fit Will’s character. Will’s faith and hope are not religious in the Abrahamic sense; he makes no leap of faith. But his search does entail a movement of transcendence because the goal of his quest is to discover the truth of his identity, of his being, hopefully by unlocking the memory of his natural father. In short, his search is religious in the sense that it is a search for authentic Being, for a true self, and is therefore metaphysical in the deepest sense. Will does not entirely reach that goal in The Last Gentleman; that will only happen to a much older Will in The Second Coming. But in the earlier novel he does overcome some of the crippling psychological disabilities he suffers at the outset of his journey and discovers the power to act decisively. He discovers who and what not to model his life after, and in that sense he gains a measure of truth and freedom. Will’s search is more successful than Myshkin’s journey. As we saw, the Prince’s journey ends in disaster—Natasha murdered by Rozumikhin, Aglaya unhappily married, and Myshkin suffering a breakdown. He fails as a man of action in his plan to save Nastasha and fails in the eyes of the world, which, given his noble character, says more about his society than about him. Will learns to act more decisively and in the end has gained important self-knowledge and psychological balance, though his pursuit of Kitty Vaught and a home in the New South is left unresolved. And in the important action at the end of the novel, he follows the authoritative command of Sister Johnette Vianney and Father Boomer to help facilitate Jamie Vaught’s baptism. As Percy staged this scene, Will becomes the coupler in the semiotic triad of communication between Sr. Vianney/Fr. Boomer, Will, and the dying Jamie. In addition, Will helps deter, at least temporarily, Sutter Vaught’s planned suicide attempt. Like Binx Bolling, the underground man, and Raskolnikov, Barrett’s life has been shaped by conflicting cultural influences. His precipitous “love” for Kitty Vaught betrays a deep-seated inherited romanticism coupled with the heroic stoicism and moralism of the Southern patriciate’s code of the honorable gentleman. As an engineer wedded to modern technology, sym-

180 

Walker Percy

bolized by his job and his high-powered German telescope, he has imbibed the ideology of scientism as a way to master the laws of nature abstractly, order his life according to its principles, and, he assumes, find selffulfillment and happiness. After quitting psychoanalysis, he resolves to “engineer the future of my life according to the self-knowledge I have so arduously gained from five years of analysis.” 8 What he fails to see is that the scientific approach objectifies the self, undermines genuine individuality, and thwarts the quest for personal freedom. Fortunately, Will’s plan to engineer his life in this fashion is comically undercut by actual experiences, especially by the urgings of his erotic passions. For a while he tries to adapt to normal society by role-playing, adopting different pseudo-identities— Ohioan, Princetonian, stereotypical Southerner, would-be Romeo, engineer—all of which fail and leave him confused and alienated. A loner, he retreats to the role of observer of life, using his good radar (the technical term is apt) to “read” other people and his telescope to relate to the world. Like Binx, Will’s character has also been shaped by his family’s Southern stoic tradition going back to the Civil War and beyond. As we saw, the central issues in this legacy focus on two key questions: how to act with honor and, failing that, whether to choose suicide. Here, Percy greatly expanded the cultural importance of these issues from The Moviegoer, but the specific challenge Will faces is the same as the one Binx faced: how does one act with honor as regards sexual relations in a postmodern culture where the traditional Christian moral code (with its prohibition of suicide) has been doubly undermined by romanticism and stoicism, on the one hand, and by the ideology of scientism on the other? In a brilliant paragraph, the narrator traces the etiology of this paralyzing predicament from the pretechnological world of Will’s ancestors to the contemporary postmodern world. (One can read this, of course, as a fictional version of Percy’s own family legacy.)9 Over the years his family had turned ironical and lost its gift for action. It was an honorable and violent family, but gradually the violence had been deflected and turned inward. The great-grandfather knew what was what 8. Percy, Last Gentleman, 41. 9. See the discussion of suicide in Percy’s family legacy in Bertram Wyatt-Brown’s The House of Percy: Honor, Melancholy and Imagination in a Southern Family (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 13–31.

The Last Gentleman: Homeward Bound 

181

and said so and acted accordingly and did not care what anyone thought. He even wore a pistol in a holster like a Western hero and once met the Grand Wizard of the Klu Klux Klan in a barbershop and invited him then and there to shoot it out in the street. The next generation, the grandfather, seemed to know what was what but he was not sure. He was brave but gave much thought to the business of being brave. He too would have shot it out with the Grand Wizard if only he could have made certain that it was the right thing to do. The father was a brave man too and he said he didn’t care what others thought, but he did. More than anything else, he wished to act with honor and be thought well of by men. So living for him was a strain. For him it was no small thing to walk down the street on an ordinary September morning. In the end he was killed by his own irony and sadness and by the strain of living out an ordinary day in a perfect dance of honor.10

Because of this complicated legacy, Barrett “had not turned out well.” 11 He had “trouble ruling out the possible,” a state of mind that paralyzes him “before every course of action,” as Kierkegaard suggested.12 Will longs to become a man of action, but given his disposition and confusion, he tends to “wait for something to happen.” What he is waiting for, the narrator says, is “war,” whereby “the possible becomes actual through no doing of one’s own,” as happened in Binx’s father’s case. Will’s own father, he recalls, was “happy” when Pearl Harbor was bombed, and volunteered at once.13 As we saw earlier, Clausewitz showed that war is an extension of the code of the duel of honor.14 What we learn later is that the pressure of trying to live each day in a “dance of honor,” sans war, led Will’s father to commit suicide. Now his son Will has no war to invest in, so the predicament of how to act with honor, given the South’s defection from the patrician code, is doubly challenging.

6 10. Percy, Last Gentleman, 9–10. 11. Ibid., 9. 12. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death, 168–70. 13. Percy, Last Gentleman, 99. 14. See Rene Girard’s analysis of Clausewitz’s theme of the relationship between the tradition of the duel and war between nations in Girard, chap. 1, “The Escalation to Extremes,” in Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoit Chantre, trans. Mary Baker (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012), 1–27.

182 

Walker Percy

Convinced that he has “fallen in love” at first sight of Kitty Vaught (through his telescope), Will decides to follow the Vaught family back to the South, marry Kitty, and settle down to an ideal married life with an attractive wife, home, and family—the stereotypical American dream Percy often satirized as a malaise-drenched death trap. But even before leaving New York, Will’s romantic fantasy of life with Kitty becomes complicated when, in a comic episode in Central Park, he faces the conflict between carnal desire and honorable action. After proposing marriage to her, Will and Kitty retreat to a “covert, so densely shaded that its floor was as bare as a cave’s dirt.” 15 Again, Percy evokes the underground setting as a stage for the engineer’s crisis. (Apropos the subterranean motif, Will earlier told Rita Vaught that he would like to study metallurgy at the Colorado School of Mines.) The tryst begins to go awry when Will’s sinuses become blocked, “flesh, poor flesh” fails, as Binx said, and begin to thwart his desire. Both he and Kitty become confused about how to act in an intimate situation. Kitty is perplexed by “the engineer’s alternating fits of passion and depression”; Will is confused by Kitty’s shifts between “dismaying tenderness” and sexual boldness. Half-undressed, she tells Will that her bold sexual advances are “a little experiment by Kitty for the sake of Kitty,” calculated to prove that “there is nothing wrong with Kitty.” 16 The latter reveals Kitty’s sexual ambivalence and pliant charms, deployed in turn to both attract and manipulate Will and her domineering sister-in-law, Rita Vaught. Will is stunned by her behavior and wonders if love is “a sweetnesse or a wantonesse.” How is a man of honor to act in such a situation? The tryst collapses when Will’s sinuses continue to plague him, and Kitty becomes sick and vomits in a corner of the culvert. Percy links Will’s confusion over Kitty’s sexual coyness/aggressiveness to the larger theme of sexual malaise in a culture of eroding ethical norms of behavior. He frames Will and Kitty’s sexual failure in the park against a larger historical and social context of violence. While they dally in the covert, a race riot is occurring in Harlem, and Will suddenly recalls an event during the Civil War, fought over slavery and the other deep social issues fueled by white fear of miscegenation. After Kitty vomits, Will re15. Percy, Last Gentleman, 107. 16. Ibid., 109.

The Last Gentleman: Homeward Bound 

183

members reading about a family kinsman who fought in the battle of Richmond in 1864. The kinsman, later killed at the Crater, wrote a letter to his mother reporting how he danced with “Miss Sally Trumbull” at a cotillion, “received her handkerchief,” but “did not feel himself under the necessity, almost moral, of making love to her, under conditions of siege.” 17 The kinsman, like Will’s great-grandfather and grandfather, followed the traditional code of gentlemanly honor, in contrast to Will’s confusion over how to act in response to Kitty’s “experimental” sexual overtures. Will’s confusion, coupled with Percy’s symbolic linking of sex and violence, is an ominous sign of the larger postmodern sexual malaise he would diagnose extensively in Lancelot and Lost in the Cosmos. The link is reinforced later when Will discovers that his own father, no longer with a war to fight, committed suicide over what he sees as the general collapse of sexual moral standards in his day. Despite the failed tryst in the park and Kitty’s anomalous behavior, Will determines to woo her in “the old style” and ask her father for her hand in marriage. However, if he succeeds in his romantic quest of the flighty Kitty, the “girl of his dreams,” it would be a disastrous diversion from his search for a true self. Heading South, Will discovers that “he loved her less,” but still trapped in his delusion, he proclaims his love and determines to “court her henceforth in the old style,” that is, without sexual advances. Although Kitty also proclaimed her love for him, Will senses that “she was out to be a proper girl and taking every care to do the right wrong thing.” Later, when they reach the “Golden Isles” (the classical abode of the dead), Will’s confusion intensifies when Kitty says, “I’ll be your whore,” only to reverse herself when Will denies thinking of her that way: “Very well. I’ll be a Lady. Love me like a Lady.” Will’s confusion is doubled by his memory of his father’s earlier advice to “go to whores” if need be, but not treat them as ladies, or treat ladies like whores. Ironically, neither alternative is relevant to Will’s predicament as a postmodern searcher. “But what am I, he wondered: neither Christian nor pagan nor proper lusty gentleman, for I’ve never got the straight of this lady-whore business.” 18 Will dreams of returning to the deep South so that he can “restore the 17. Ibid., 111–12. 18. Ibid., 164–65, 179, 180.

184 

Walker Percy

good name of my family,” resurrect the Hampton plantation, and “live out my days as a just man and little father to the faithful Negroes working in the fields.” But his dream to resurrect the Old South world is rudely shattered when they reach home ground. “The South they came home to was different from the South they left. It was happy, victorious, Christian, rich, patriotic and Republican.” Its happiness is “almost invincible,” its women “beautiful and charming,” its men “healthy and successful,” its citizens “patriotic and religious,” and its general economy booming (except for poor whites and blacks). The description is Percy’s scathing satire against a society wedded like the rest of America to the utopian goals of pagan secular humanism and material prosperity. Will feels totally alienated from the progressive New South, so much so that “the happiness of the South drove him wild with despair.” 19 Will also finds a South saturated with romantic nostalgia. The Vaught home is a faux castle tinged with the retrogressive trappings of a bygone age. It sits on a golf course and was built in the 1920s “when rich men still sought to recall the heroic ages and features a Norman tower and casement windows with panes of bottle glass.” 20 Yet despite its idyllic façade and trappings, the Vaught family home is a nest of discord and tension. Poppy Vaught’s main concerns are the success of his car dealership and the chronic problems of his broken family. His oldest son and daughter are, in his view, complete failures. Sutter is a failed physician (now an assistant coroner) turned serial fornicator; daughter Val is a renegade turned Catholic nun. Younger son Jamie is dying of leukemia, while daughter Kitty is utterly confused about what to do with her life. Everyone in the family likes Will and some—Poppy Vaught, Kitty, and Sutter’s ex-wife, Rita—scheme to take advantage of his good nature. Beyond the “castle” of the “happy” upper-class South, the region seethes with racial tensions beginning to erupt in angry protests, sit-ins, murders, and the upheaval of the civil rights movement.

6 Like Dostoevsky, Percy focused Will’s search within a context of opposing ideological visions of reality, each one a potential model Will might imitate as he tries to discover how to live his life. The fatally ill Jamie believes in 19. Ibid., 151, 185, 187. 20. Ibid., 189.

The Last Gentleman: Homeward Bound 

185

reason and science even more strongly than Will. He reads abstract books like The Theory of Large Numbers and is interested in possible communication with spirits and other worlds in the galaxy. He is also a disciple of transcendental idealism. His older sister, Val, convert and Catholic nun, is appalled at Jamie’s ignorance of the Christian gospel and life’s ultimate meaning— for her, mankind’s redemption by Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection and salvation through baptism. As an authoritative religious voice, a bearer of the “good news,” she lays a heavy responsibility on Will to see to the dying Jamie’s baptism if she is not present. Opposite Val, the Catholic believer, stands her sister-in-law, Rita, an avowed secular humanist and devotee of Native American myths who has no use for Val’s Catholic faith. Instead of a sacramental death for Jamie, Rita insists that she only wishes to help Jamie “fulfill his potential” in the time he has left and achieve “death with dignity.” She schemes to wrest Jamie from the influence of Val and that of her hated ex-husband Sutter. As well, she schemes maliciously to keep Kitty and Will separated. Percy dramatized the major battle in this ideological conflict in a nasty argument between Rita and Sutter over Jamie’s fate, a struggle Will witnesses. He has already been put under obligation by Val to attend to Jamie’s baptism. But he remains confused as he listens to Rita and Sutter argue. “He could not quite make out this pair and wished to get another fix on them. Val was his triangulation point.” 21 Focusing the conflict through Will’s consciousness, Percy composed a thematic triad of perspectives—Val’s Catholic faith, Rita’s secular humanism, and Sutter’s religious despair. Rita insists that she only wants Jamie to achieve “as much self-fulfillment in the little time he has left. I desire for him beauty and joy, not death.” Rita’s ideal of life is that of the romantic-aesthetic, which to Sutter (and Kierkegaard) is a form of aesthetic “damnation.” To Sutter, Rita’s goal for Jamie is death. Sutter’s plan for Jamie is the more practical one of trying to help his brother face the reality of death. He had already taken Jamie to the desert, perhaps out of despair, or perhaps to test the possibility of a final religious experience. Sutter, as Percy insisted, is religious in the Kierkegaardian sense, having overleaped the conventional ethical way of life.22 He is Kierkegaard’s 21. Ibid., 243. 22. Lawson and Kramer, Conversations with Walker Percy, 126.

186 

Walker Percy

self-conscious man in the depth of despair, open to both suicide and possible conversion.23 (Paradoxically, he most resembles Dostoevsky’s Stavrogin in this respect.) Sutter also intuits that Rita’s hidden motive in her plan for a “beautiful” death for Jamie is to thwart her hated ex-husband. Percy’s larger critique of Rita’s secular humanism comes in Sutter’s sharp analysis of their failed marriage. “We were good,” he tells Rita, “as good as you wanted us to be, and in the end I couldn’t stand it.” Sutter says they were “self-actualizing people and altogether successful, in our cultivation of joy, zest, awe, freshness and the right balance of adult autonomous control and childlike playfulness, as you used to call it.” Rita also proclaimed that they were “good in bed” together, while Sutter confesses that “in the end I collapsed. Being geniuses of the orgasm is the hardest of tasks, far more demanding than Calvinism.” Rita saw their life as the fulfillment of the pagan humanist’s earthly dream; Sutter sees it as spiritual death. When Kitty earlier praised Rita for unselfishness, Sutter called her unselfishness a “fornication of the spirit.” 24 As Kierkegaard argued, the self is “spirit,” and Rita’s “unselfish” care for others defrauds them of their responsibility to become a self transparently under God.25 Sutter sees that Rita’s seeming devotion to others is really a ploy by which she manipulates them to her ends. Rejecting a death-in-life with Rita, Sutter chooses “old-fashioned humbug,” the sexual promiscuity Christianity condemns as sin. He tells Rita, “You are wrong about yourself and wrong about what you think you want. There is nothing wrong with you beyond a certain spitefulness and pride and a penchant for a certain species of bullshit.” Having witnessed their argument, Will retreats to his room and hides in bed, upset and confused by their display of vicious sexual combat. Nevertheless, Sutter’s religious critique of Rita’s humanism gives him another perspective, along with Val’s faith and her command to him to see to Jamie’s baptism, to weigh as he tries to decide what to do about his dying friend. He now has a better fix on Rita’s behavior, on the pitfalls of a sexual misalliance, and on the ultimate stakes for Jamie.

6 23. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death, 196–99. 24. Percy, Last Gentleman, 117. 25. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death, 146–54.

The Last Gentleman: Homeward Bound 

187

Since like Myshkin, Will lacks the kind of father/authority figure we saw represented in Porfiry, the monk Zosima, and Bishop Tikhon, he turns to the disgraced Sutter for advice about how to live in the world. Through their relationship Percy focuses his central theme of the link between postmodern sexual malaise and suicide. Will thinks that Sutter knows something that he does not know and hopes Sutter will provide clues or answers to his perplexing situation. Percy anticipates their first private meeting with Will’s memory of hearing his father quote Montaigne, who sanctioned suicide as an acceptable natural act, while listening to Brahms and raging against the moral collapse of society. He recalls how his father told him that those who minister and attend prayer meetings now “fornicate and the one who fornicates best is the preacher.” With the Great Horn theme sounding in the background, “the very sound of the ruined gorgeousness of the nineteenth century, the very worst of times,” lawyer Barrett condemns all levels of society. “But they, ‘he said to the levee—’ they fornicate too and in public and expect them back yonder somehow not to notice. Then they expect their women to be respected.” His father dolefully predicts a total moral collapse. “One will pick up the worst of the other and lose the best of himself. Watch. One will learn to fornicate in public and the other will end by pissing in the street. Watch.” His father warns young Will, “Don’t treat a lady like a whore or a whore like a lady, else you will be like them,” either “a fornicator and not caring,” or “a fornicator and a hypocrite.” 26 Significantly, Will’s father did not rage against fornication per se. He does not speak of it as a sin against God or another person or a degradation of the spirit. Instead, what infuriated him was the breakdown of patrician social conventions regarding sexual behavior, the dualistic standard of fulfilling erotic desire on the one hand while living as an “honorable” person on the other. However, lawyer Barrett’s hypocritical advice to his son is totally irrelevant in Will’s postmodern society. Sutter Vaught, a pivotal figure in Will’s search, embodies all the paradoxes of sexuality-suicide that Percy saw in the postmodern predicament. Like Binx and the underground man, Sutter is a self-conscious thinker partly shaped by the ideology of reason and science. But Sutter recogniz26. Percy, Last Gentleman, 100–101.

188 

Walker Percy

es the implicit determinism and impoverishment of the spirit this ideology entails. He is deeply aware of his own despair, and, like Stavrogin, he rebels against hypocritical conventional morality by his flagrant behavior as a serial fornicator. (Like Stavrogin he deliberately stages some of his transgressions to ensure they will be discovered.) For Percy, Sutter’s sexual transgressions represent a dilemma faced by the self-conscious autonomous man. Alienated by his self-awareness and governed only by autonomous self-will, Sutter attempts to reenter the concrete physical world as a man of action by sexual intercourse and repeated lewd behavior.27 His attempt to realize a concrete self through intercourse may give him temporary escape from the prison of self-consciousness, but without love, it fails as a solution to his isolation. Repeated failures leave Sutter, as it did Stavrogin, faced with the most radical form of escape—suicide. He has already written a scholarly article titled, appropriately, “The Incidence of Post-Orgasmic Suicide in Male University Graduate Students,” with the second section subtitled, “The Failure of Coitus as a Mode of Reentry into the Sphere of Immanence from the Sphere of Transcendence.” 28 At the same time, however, Sutter does possess a religious consciousness. His despair and rebellion against what he sees as the general collapse of spiritual meaning in the culture, especially regarding sexual behavior, can be understood as a moral and metaphysical rebellion against the times. He despises not only sexual hypocrisy, but also the vapid secular humanism of his ex-wife, Rita, as we saw. Sutter sees secular humanism as an offshoot of nineteenth-century sentimental romanticism (Rita, like the young Dostoevsky, is a devotee of Shiller), typified in the writings of Leigh Hunt, whom he calls “the anti-Christ.” Sutter agrees with his sister Val that faith in Christian redemption is the only possible solution to postmodern man’s spiritual predicament, but he thinks this belief has been thoroughly corrupted in contemporary society. Trapped between his moral conscience and his postmodern selfconsciousness, Sutter cannot resolve the dilemma. To escape his despair would take, in Kierkegaardian terms, a “leap of faith.” Consequently, his rebellion against the tawdriness and hypocrisy of society is negative, also 27. Percy, Lost in the Cosmos, 117–59. 28. Percy, Last Gentleman, 65.

The Last Gentleman: Homeward Bound 

189

like that of Stavrogin. Yet trapped in his own despair, Sutter wisely refused to serve as an authority/father figure to Will. “Fornicate if you want to and enjoy yourself but don’t come looking to me for a merit badge certifying you as a Christian or a gentleman or whatever it is you cleave by.” 29 Sutter knows he does not have the moral authority to offer counsel; Will must find his own answer. Nevertheless, before he and Jamie head West, he leaves clues about their destination and even more valuable clues for Will in the form of his notebooks. Percy justified his extensive use of Sutter’s notebook in the novel as a way to avoid the long ideological discussions between characters he often found in Dostoevsky’s novels, which he considered too direct and undramatic. Whether the device works as a technique is debatable, but it does serve Percy’s dual purpose of offering his own diagnosis of the sexualitysuicide predicament and of advancing young Will’s search for authority on the road to greater self-understanding. Will reads the notebook intermittently as he makes his way west to Santa Fe to find Sutter and Jamie. Will’s reading serves him as another triadic focal point to help him understand the debate between Sutter the faithless one and his Catholic sister, Val. Understanding both perspectives stimulates Will own intellectual development. As we see, Percy links this development to Will’s later discovery, and rejection of, his father’s despair and to his pivotal role in Jamie’s baptism. The first casebook entry is an autopsy report on a “white male, circa 49, apparently mugged in a hotel after attending a pornographic smoker and visiting a brothel.” In this entry and those that follow, Percy’s voice, through Sutter, explores the deep connection between sexual malaise, porno­ graphy, scientism, the collapse of traditional metaphysics and religious faith, and, eventually, suicide. Sutter offers a grim diagnosis. “Lewdness = sole concrete metaphysic of layman in age of science = sacrament of the dispossessed. Things, persons, relations emptied out, not by theory but by lay reading of theory. There remains only relation of skin to skin and hand under dress.” The next two important entries pinpoint the relation Sutter finds between lewdness and scientism. “Scientist not himself pornographer in the practice of science, but the price and beauty of the method of 29. Ibid., 225.

190 

Walker Percy

science = the dispossession of the layman. Lewdness = climate of the anteroom of science.” Lewdness becomes a way to transcend the dispossession of the self. “Science, which (in layman’s view) dissolves concrete things and relations, leaves intact touch of skin on skin.” The result, Sutter writes, “relation of genital sexuality reinforced twice: once because it is touch, therefore physical, therefore ‘real’; again, because it corresponds with theoretical (i.e., sexual substrate of all other relations). Therefore, genital sexuality = twice ‘real.’ ” The practitioner of lewdness becomes “the perfect pornographer = a man who lives in the anteroom of science (not in research laboratory) and who lives in the twilight of Christianity, i.e. a technician.” 30 Percy juxtaposes Sutter’s critique of scientism and lewdness against his sister, Val’s, Catholic orthodoxy. “I do not deny, Val, that a revival of your sacramental system is an alternative to lewdness (the only other alternative is a forgetting of the old sacrament), for lewdness itself is a kind of sacrament (devilish, if you will). The difference is that my sacrament is operational, and yours is not.” 31 He also challenges Val’s belief in sin, as Percy extends Binx’s comment on sin in The Moviegoer. “I do not deny, as do many of my colleagues, that sin exists. But what I see is not sin but paltriness. Paltriness is the disease. The only difference between you and me is that you think purity and life can only come from eating the body and drinking the blood of Christ. I don’t know where it comes from.” 32 Sutter then generalizes his argument to the entire culture. Americans are not devilish but they are becoming lewd as devils. Americans are the most Christian of all people and also the lewdest. Main Street, USA = a million-dollar segregated church on one corner, a drug store with dirty books on the other, a lewd movie on the third, and on the fourth a B-girl bar with condom dispensers in the gents room. Delay your climax cream. Even our official decency is a lewd sort of decency. 33

As he travels westward, Will continues to read the casebook at night. In the next entry, Sutter makes the triad of scientism-lewdness-suicide more explicit. It records an autopsy performed on a twenty-five-year-old scien30. Ibid., 270–82, 279–80, 280. 31. Ibid., 281. 32. Ibid., 280–81. 33. Ibid., 182.

The Last Gentleman: Homeward Bound 

191

tist, an MIT graduate employed at the Redstone Arsenal. Suicide considered a consequence of the spirit of abstraction and of transcendence; lewdness as the sole portal of entry in world dominated by immanence; reentry into immanence via orgasm; but post-orgasmic transcendence seven devils worse than the first. But since no avenue of reentry remains except genital and since reentry coterminous (with orgasm), post-orgasmic despair without remedy.34 Sutter sees no hope for postmodern Western society. “We are all doomed to the transcendence of abstraction and I choose the only entry in the world that remains to us. What is better than the beauty and exaltation of the practice of transcendence (science and art) and of the delectation of immanence, the beauty and exaltation of lewd love?” But Will shrewdly recognizes the flawed dualism of Sutter’s diagnosis. “Where he probably goes wrong, mused the engineer sleepily, is in the extremity of his alternatives: God and not God, getting under women’s dresses and blowing your brains out. Whereas and in fact my problem is how to live from one ordinary minute to the next on a Wednesday afternoon.” 35 Like Binx, Will’s predicament is how to deal with the existential “here and now” of experience and avoid the traps of false transcendence and suicidal fatalism. Indeed, trapped in despair, Sutter has already made one unsuccessful suicide attempt and plans to kill himself after Jamie dies. Having detected Sutter’s despair, Will now realizes that the doctor cannot serve as an authoritative father figure, one to solve his sexual anxiety or to imitate as a role model, or tell him how to live his life. Percy offers a concrete alternative to Sutter’s paralyzing despair during Will’s brief but important visit to the Tyree mission school run by Val / Sr. Johnette Vianney. The visit exposes Will to the concrete mystery of religious faith in the “here and now.” Val is a woman who has made a “leap of faith,” made under the compelling authority of a nun she met in the Columbia University library. Val’s personality is a paradox and a mystery. She has a streak of “meanness” and is a “good hater,” but also a staunch Catholic who has found a way to act with authority in the world. She will work with “paltry” hypocrites and businessmen for the benefit of the mission, for which 34. Ibid., 345 (my emphasis). 35. Ibid., 354–55.

192 

Walker Percy

the proud Sutter condemns her. She is totally committed to educating the poor, dumb Tyree children by opening them to the wonders of language, Percy’s defining characteristic of human identity, consciousness, and freedom.36 Through Will’s encounter with Val, Percy focuses on the concrete mystery of the nun’s powerful personality and Will’s inability to fathom her strange faith, her commitment to word and deed, a sharp contrast to the abstract language of Sutter’s notebook and his sterile life. Behind Sister Val’s total commitment to the children is her firm belief in Christ’s Word as the source of spiritual life.37 For all her rough edges, her life and work are sacramental. Will is mystified by her religious faith, but he recognizes the integrity and joy she experiences in her work with the children. She has discovered who she is and how to act—exactly what Will is searching for. Will lacks her religious faith, but he feels the force of her authority as she enjoins him again to see to Jamie’s baptism before his death. The visit leaves an indelible mark on Will, especially as a counterweight to Sutter’s despair, as he comes to make his own decisions at the end of the novel. Before continuing his journey, Will makes one final trip to his ancestral home, a brief but decisive return. Will’s experiences since his days as a loner working in Macy’s basement have changed him irrevocably. No longer a dreamy, passive observer, he has taken action through his proposal to Kitty and his plan to establish a home. (His engagement to her, we learn in the sequel, The Second Coming, never leads to marriage.) Moreover, from his tryst with Kitty and from Sutter’s casebook he has learned more about the dynamics of sexual desire and “honorable” action. At home, he takes action by punching Deputy Sheriff Beans Ross—“for once things became as clear as they used to be in the old honorable days,” and by helping pseudo-Negro Forney Aiken and his actor friends escape town. More importantly, he comes to confront the legacy of his dead father. For Percy, Will’s return is 36. Percy discussed language as the uniquely human capacity in many essays and interviews. See especially “The Mystery of Language,” in The Message in the Bottle (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), 119–50, and “The Fateful Rift: The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind,” in Signposts in a Strange Land, ed., introduction Patrick Samway (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 271–95. 37. For an excellent discussion of this theme, see Gary Ciuba’s book Walker Percy: Books of Revelations (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), 110–14. See also John F. Desmond, Walker Percy’s Search for Community (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 103–6.

The Last Gentleman: Homeward Bound 

193

what Kierkegaard called a “repetition,” that is, a movement of transcendence made by the religious seeker for the truth of one’s self.38 At home, Will recalls the night when as a youth he watched his father pacing in the darkness under the oak trees. His father again rails against the moral collapse of society. When Will insists that their enemies have left town, his father declares, “We haven’t won, son. We’ve lost. Once they were the fornicators and takers of bribes and we were not and that was why they hated us. Now we are like them, so why should they stay? They know they don’t have to kill us.” 39 Declaring that “we’ve lost all, son,” but that “I don’t have to choose that,” his father ignores Will’s call to “wait,” ascends to the attic, and kills himself with a shotgun. Reflecting on his father’s suicide, Will touches the iron horse head of the hitching post and the “warm, finny whispering bark of the water oak” and receives a stunning revelation. The epiphany gives him a firm, but fleeting clue to “how to live” in the world without being riven by abstraction, self-absorption, despair, and suicide as his dead father was and as his adoptive “father” Sutter is. Wait. While his fingers absorbed the juncture of iron and bark, his eyes narrowed as if he caught a glimmer of light on the cold iron skull. Wait. I think he was wrong and looking in the wrong place. No, not he but the times. The times were wrong and one looked in the wrong place. It wasn’t even his fault because that was the way he was and the way the times were, and there was no other place a man could look. It was the worst of times, a time of fake beauty and fake victory. Wait. He had missed it! It was not in the Brahms that one looked and not in the solitariness and not in the sad old poetry—he wrung out his ear—but here, under your nose, here in the various curiousness and drollness and extraness of the iron and the bark—he shook his head—that—.40

38. See Martin Luschei’s definition of repetition in his The Sovereign Wayfarer: Walker Percy’s Diagnosis of the Malaise (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972), 48–52. For a brilliant discussion of patterns of repetition and their significance in Percy’s life and work, see Edward J. Dupuy’s book Autobiography in Walker Percy: Repetition, Recovery, and Redemption (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996). 39. Percy, Last Gentleman, 330. 40. Ibid., 332.

194 

Walker Percy

What Will experiences is a concrete, mysterious revelation of being, a religious intuition of the indwelling spirit (“extraness”) in the material, a sacramental vison of reality that offers a “way to live” and avoid the traps of isolation, abstraction, and despair. The revelation reinforces Will’s commitment to live and act decisively in the world, though he will not discover its deepest spiritual significance—the divine source of this revelation of Being—until many years later in The Second Coming. In the final scenes, Will proves himself ready to act by helping Jamie as he lies dying and by dissuading Sutter, at least temporarily, from another suicide attempt. Percy situates Will at the point of semiotic triangulation between the competing influences of Sister Johnette Vianney (Val), Rita, and Sutter. Against Rita’s wishes for a humane, secular death, without a thought of Jamie’s eternal destiny, Sutter acquiesces in Val’s command that Jamie be baptized before he dies. Although Will does not understand the significance of the Catholic rite, he follows Sutter’s acceptance and helps the authoritative “news-bearer,” Father Boomer, communicate with the dying Jamie as he receives the sacrament. As I have suggested, in this triadic communication Will serves as the “coupler” in transmitting the verbal and physical signs between the priest and Jamie so that the action of the baptism is complete. Although Will has not yet found his vocation in the world—he still hopes to marry Kitty and settle down—in these final actions he, like Binx and Alyosha, has committed himself in helping Jamie to a “good death” and to deterring Sutter from suicide. For Percy, The Last Gentleman marked a significant advancement in dramatizing the ideological conflicts between secular humanism and Christianity he had begun to diagnose in The Moviegoer. As well, the novel’s emphasis on the existential link between scientism, sexuality, and suicide marks a defining difference from and extension beyond Dostoevsky’s attack on the materialist-objectivist view of reality. At the same time, Percy suggested significant parallels and differences between the predicaments of Will Barrett and Myshkin, Sutter Vaught and Dostoevsky’s sexual predators the underground man, Svidrigalov, and Stavrogin. Perhaps most importantly, in Will Barrett he developed a more realistic and resilient wayfarer than the saintly but doomed Prince Myshkin.

The Last Gentleman: Homeward Bound 

195

Chap ter 10 Lancelot What Do Survivors Do?

In an important letter to his friend the literary historian and critic Lewis P. Simpson, Walker Percy stated that his fourth novel, Lancelot, was intended to demonstrate “the incapacity of the postmodern consciousness to deal with sexuality.” 1 Percy’s statement reveals that he saw his protagonist Lance Lamar as a representative figure of the culture and that the novel would explore the full moral implications of that “incapacity.” For Percy, that incapacity pointed to a failure of mature, responsible love between adult individuals. In developing this broad theme, Percy advanced Dostoevsky’s concern with sexual predation and the failure of mature love by linking Lance’s story to parallel situations and themes in Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov. As I hope to demonstrate, Lance is a child molester like Dostoevsky’s sexual predators. The failure of mature love, for Percy, is especially manifested in the rampant promiscuity, pornography, rape, and child molestation in American culture, all of which are symptoms of the deeper moral/spiritual disorder. Lance’s closest fictional ancestors are Ivan Karamazov and Ivan’s doubles, the Grand Inquisitor and the shabby devil, with additional resemblances to Svidrigalov, Stavrogin, and Kirilov. One way to see the resemblance between 1. Lewis P. Simpson, Imagining Our Time: Recollections and Reflections on American Writing, introduction Fred Hobson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007), 224.

196 

Lance and Ivan and the others is to recall Dostoevsky’s statement, cited earlier, that he considered the rape of a child to be the worst sin and crime one could commit, and that he once thought of writing a novel on the subject.2 Although he never wrote such a novel, his obsession with the sexual abuse of children and adolescents, as I have shown, is evident throughout his major novels. Behind the specific instances of sexual molestation in his novels—by Svidrigalov, Totsky, and Stavrogin—lies the larger theological question about the gratuitous suffering of children, including sexual molestation, voiced by Ivan in the “Rebellion” chapter of The Brothers Karamazov (part 2, chap. 5, 4).3 Ivan’s objection to a God who permits such suffering is echoed in Lancelot, first when Lance asks Father John, “If one is looking for evil, why not study war or child-battering? Can anything be more evil?,” and more viciously near the end of the novel when he proclaims, “God’s secret design for man is that man’s happiness lies for men in practicing violence upon women and woman’s happiness lies in submitting to it. The secret of life is violence and rape and its gospel is pornography.” 4 Though in his second comment Lance is speaking of adult men and women, I shall argue that Percy portrays Lance as a man who effectively treats women as children to manipulate and dominate, sexually and otherwise. Dostoevsky’s child and adolescent molesters anticipate Lance Lamar. As we shall see, Lance is a child molester in the deepest, most perverse sense. Lancelot is unique among Percy’s novels in that it is the only one in which actual suicide is not an explicit theme or motif, although Lance mentions briefly that Father John’s family was prone to suicide. Nevertheless, Lance is a spiritual suicide, a man in despair in the Kierkegaardian understanding that I have used throughout this study. To recall: Kierkegaard (and Percy) believed that the self can only become a fully human self “transparently under God” by accepting God alone as the absolute measure of the self. Conversely, despair or spiritual suicide is the refusal to be a self “transparently under God,” often by a willful, defiant rejection of God as the absolute measure. Like Ivan, Lance is such a defiant self, though in both cases the 2. Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time, ed. Mary Petrusewicz (Princeton, N.J., and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), 448. 3. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans., annotated Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 236–46. 4. Walker Percy, Lancelot (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 241.

Lancelot: What Do Survivors Do? 

197

judgment must be further qualified, as we shall see. Given Kierkegaard’s and Percy’s understanding of the self, one can further say that to become a self “transparently under God” is to become a mature, sexual self—that is, a responsible, loving agent toward other human beings. The goal of development in this regard is to transform natural erotic desire into a nonpossessive love of another (caritas), as Kierkegaard maintained in Works of Love.5 Significantly, to Kierkegaard’s description of the fully human self, Percy added that the self can only discover its true self “transparently with another under God”; that is, through human love with another in a solitude à deux. Neither Ivan nor Lance, both defiant rebels, can achieve genuine love or mature selfhood, and Lance’s failure particularly reveals the sexual dysfunction Percy diagnosed in postmodern American culture. There is a temptation among some critics to see Lance Lamar as a totally demonic or mad character, though Percy’s claim to Simpson indicates that he created Lance as both unique and typical. He is an extreme case, but neither completely satanic nor insane. When he came to write the novel, Percy might well have had in mind the remark of Dostoevsky’s underground man near the end of the novella: “A novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered here, and what matters most, it produces an unpleasant sensation, for we are all divorced from life, we are all cripples, every one of us, more or less.” When his imaginary reader protests this generalization, he replies, “I have only in my life carried to an extreme what you have not dared to carry halfway, and what’s more, you have taken your cowardice for good sense, and have found comfort in deceiving yourselves.” 6 His statement could equally be applied to Lance Lamar. As Joseph Frank argued, the underground man is “not only a moralpsychological type whose egoism (Dostoevsky) wishes to expose; he is also a social-ideological one, whose psychology must be seen as intimately interconnected to the ideas which he accepts and by which he tries to live.” 7 The same can be said, I believe, of Lance Lamar. To understand the ideas that shape Lance’s thoughts and actions and to 5. Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, ed., introduction and notes Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 44–60. 6. Frank, “Notes on Notes from Underground,” in Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground, trans., ed. Michael R. Katz (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 206, 236. 7. Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time, 415.

198 

Walker Percy

substantiate my claim that Lance is a child molester like Dostoevsky’s predators, we must begin by recalling Ivan’s rebellion against God over the issue of the suffering of innocent children, a charge that Lance in effect repeats. Ivan tells his brother Alyosha that it is unreasonable and impossible to love any individual human being (though he claims to love Alyosha); he admits that one might theoretically own to a general love of humanity.8 Ivan claims that it’s impossible to love individual adults because all are tainted with corruption; only children are innocent. He finds it irrational to accept the idea of a loving God who permits the suffering of innocent children. He rejects such a God in the name of human justice and demands immediate “retribution.” 9 Ivan’s argument about the innocence of children is a myth. Dostoevsky often paid tribute to the natural goodness of heart and the spontaneous affection of children, but he had no illusions about their moral innocence. Experience showed otherwise, as Dostoevsky dramatized when Alyosha encountered the hate-filled boy Ilyusha engaged in a rock-throwing fight against a gang of youths tormenting him. Or, for example, in the girl-child who leers seductively at a horrified Svidrigalov shortly before his suicide in Crime and Punishment. Nevertheless, Ivan insists that children alone are innocent and lovable, and that he loves children. But it is important to note that in his mythic view of them they are prepubescent, “pre-sexual” creatures, a crucial point for understanding Lance Lamar’s behavior later. Like Ivan, Lance will project and cling to such a mythic view and make a similar condemnation of God. Despite his claim to love children alone, Ivan’s real attitude toward them is profoundly ambivalent, and so is Lance’s. As Rowan Williams has argued, Ivan “loves” them because to him they represent the closest approximation to a pre-adult, idealized state of innocence he longs for (as did Svidrigalov). Ivan’s “disincarnate” notion of love precludes the reality of growth into adulthood in favor of “a world of timeless harmony.” 10 Presumably, part of this longing is a desire to preserve such an alleged state of innocence. But there is also a measure of envy and resentment in this longing, since Ivan 8. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 237. 9. Ibid., 244. 10. Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2008), 70–78. I am greatly indebted to Williams’s study in developing themes in this chapter.

Lancelot: What Do Survivors Do? 

199

has already been condemned to adult knowledge. Paradoxically, he envies the children their innocence, yet resents the God who created it. Percy will trace a similar pattern in Lance. As Williams also argues, Ivan’s insistence on the innocence of children implicitly betrays a resentment of the body’s inevitable growth and development into adult sexual identity, with all its tensions and interpersonal conflicts. It is no accident in this regard that in his relations with Katerina Verkhovtsev, Ivan is portrayed as aloof and “abstract,” or to use Williams’s term, “disincarnate.” 11 Just as Ivan’s attitude toward “innocent” children is ambivalent, so also is his posture toward the God he rejects. It is a mistake, as I have said, to see Ivan simply as rebellious agnostic. As is true of Dostoevsky’s other major characters and of Lance Lamar later, Ivan is a deeply divided character who longs for justice and a coherent universal moral order on the one hand and, on the other, a man who deeply resents and resists the actual order of the world in which he lives. His resentment of the world per se, with all its inexplicable suffering, is of course projected onto God. Nevertheless, his rebellion does represent a moral reaction to human misery, and as such, it implicitly affirms a standard of values—of good and evil—that he feels is constantly violated. But as Ivan is reluctantly forced to admit, in a world in which “God does not exist, all things are permitted.” Later, we will see Lance rage against the loss of even basic distinctions between good and evil in his society. In Ivan’s nineteenth-century Russia, as I have argued, the Judeo-Christian ethical system still possessed considerable religious and social force. But in 1960s American society, at least as Lance sees it, that force has either largely dissipated or been totally corrupted. Like Ivan’s, Lance’s despair and rage are in part a reaction to this presumed loss and, as such, can be seen paradoxically as an affirmation of those standards. Stated differently, if their despair is spiritually suicidal, it is still better than the unconscious despair of the lotus-eaters, those Percy called “non-suicides.” 12

6 Ivan’s rebellion against God and his outrage at the violation of innocent children is largely, though not entirely, fueled by his rationalist ideology, or 11. Ibid., 76. 12. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death, trans., introduction Walter Lowrie (1941; repr. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955), 200–208.

200 

Walker Percy

what he calls his “Euclidean” mind. The same can be said for Lance Lamar. Lance suffers from that distortion of consciousness by his allegiance to the ideology of “reason and science” (scientism) that Percy succinctly described in “Notes for a Novel about the End of the World.” 13 The fact is made clear in Lance’s first claimed reaction to his discovery of his wife, Margot’s, infidelity. He compares it to an astronomer’s discovery of a wayward comet that will soon strike the earth catastrophically. After establishing proof of Margot’s adultery by checking his daughter Siobhan’s blood type, he proceeds to examine the fact like a good scientist. He tries to fit the fact of Siobhan’s conception into a general category to make its meaning intelligible. But the empirical facts of events do not reveal their inner, spiritual meaning; they are “incommensurate” experiences, especially as regards sexual relations.14 Consequently, Lance faces an irreducible mystery and concludes that “sex is not a category at all”; it is a “unique mystery” and “a kind of possession.” It is “a unique ecstasy—ex-stasis—like possession by Satan.” Lance’s comparison of the sex act to demonic possession is highly significant.15 Anthropologist Rene Girard would have much to say about Lance’s comment. Girard’s theory of mimetic imitation posits that all humans are imitative creatures; none are “original.” Rather than compare sexual intercourse to a different sort of imitation or ecstasy, for example to a state of spiritual transcendence, Lance chooses to compare it to possession by the devil. Lance’s comparison of the sex act to demonic possession reveals his distorted view of sex and the body, which I shall discuss later in this chapter. The word “ecstasy,” etymologically, means “out of place,” and as Lance applies it to sex, it points to a kind of transcendent experience—that is, an ecstatic transfiguration of the flesh, as it were, that seems to temporarily approximate a state of infinity. Later, Lance claims that sexual intercourse is the only “earthly infinity.” 16 Reason and ordinary self-control are displaced by rapturous joy. Lance’s comparison of this experience to possession by Satan is apt, though for reasons he is not aware of. Satan is a bodiless spirit, a “disincarnate” being. He can only become human by taking possession of 13. Percy, “Notes for a Novel about the End of the World,” in The Message in the Bottle (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), 101–19. 14. Percy, Lancelot, 15. 15. Rene Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2001), 7–13. 16. Percy, Lancelot, 137.

Lancelot: What Do Survivors Do? 

201

a person’s mind and will. In fact, as we shall see later in discussing Ivan’s encounter with the shabby devil, the devil as a disincarnate spirit is the enemy of the body and hates mankind out of envy of his bodily human state and his freedom. As Rowan Williams said, “The devil is the source of a self-annihilation that paralyzes or pushes toward suicide.” 17 Sexual intercourse may or may not be “satanic,” as Lance claims, depending on motive and the moral relationship of the partners, but one of the ways Satan can promote self-destruction is by “possessing” the self with the reductive delusion that sexual union is, finally, the only real way to validate the self. Here, in Lance’s claim that sexual ecstasy is like possession by Satan, it is difficult to tell if he truly believes this, or if it is an exercise in hyperbole, perhaps intended to trap or scandalize his listener Father John. Whatever his secret motives, Lance’s equation of sex with demonic possession reveals a deeper truth that he fails to recognize: that like Satan he fears and distrusts the body—the “trap” of unreasonable desire—and regards sex as evil, despite his boastful claims to the contrary. Lance’s claimed “astronomer’s” reaction to the discovery of Margot’s adultery and his theory about sex as satanic possession are diversions from the central issue he fails to confront: his own moral complicity in his relations with Margot and their failed marriage, their mutual failure of genuine love. Lance has used her for his egoistic and sexual gratification as his “Lady/Whore,” while Margot has used him as her idealized lover and pseudo-patrician lord of the manor. To face this hard truth of their mutual complicity, deceit, and self-deceit would require confronting Margot directly about her infidelity. After the discovery of her adultery, Lance faces the crucial question of what to do now. But instead of confronting Margot directly, he chooses to proceed like a “scientist” and seek a visual demonstration. Having factual proof of her adultery is not enough. His objectivist cast of mind tells him that “to know” means “to see”; knowledge is only “real” if it can be objectively demonstrated. His planned “scientific” search or demonstration obscures the shattering emotional shock he felt at her betrayal. Moreover, it hides from Lance his deeply sadomasochistic motive—his desire to humiliate Margot, for whom he harbors hidden contempt and resentment because she gave herself (he calls her his “possession”) to 17. Williams, Dostoevsky, 73.

202 

Walker Percy

another man. He assumes the devious role of detective-spy-voyeur, secretly watching Margot and her motley crew of movie folks for signs of their sexual misbehavior. His morally passive stance in this regard resembles that of Ivan, who intuits that his father will be murdered but refuses to act to prevent it, and that of Stavrogin, who knows of Pyotr’s nihilistic plan to foment chaos, that Fetya will murder his wife, and that the adolescent Matryosha will likely commit suicide after he has raped her. With his plot to videotape Margot and her presumed lover in bed, Lance becomes a pornographer. Here, as in Sutter’s notebook in The Last Gentleman and in Lost in the Cosmos, Percy points to pornography as a salient characteristic of the postmodern mind deformed by scientism. The next stage in the “logic” of pornography, of course, is the taking of erotic pleasure in child pornography, viewing photographs or videotapes of the sexual corruption of children, a major theme in Percy’s last novel, The Thanatos Syndrome. Before he undertakes his “search for sin” by exposing Margot’s adultery, Lance cynically suggests to Father John that he may be “doing God’s work” if he can unravel the mystery of evil in his quest. “In times when nobody is interested in God, what would happen if you could prove the existence of sin, pure and simple? Wouldn’t that be a windfall for you? A new proof of God’s existence!” 18 At the same time, he offers a more empirical reason for his plan. He tells the priest that “one first had to accept and believe what one knew theoretically. One must see for oneself. One has to know for sure before doing anything.” 19 Lance’s “need to know” before acting echoes Will Barrett’s early state of mind in The Last Gentleman, except that Lance already has proof of Margot’s infidelity. Coupled with his refusal to confront her directly, his argument for spying on Margot unwittingly reveals the paralysis and moral impotence that has plagued him for years. Just as the narrator of The Last Gentleman described Will’s ancestor, Lance reminds Father John that their ancestors were “men of action,” as indeed Lance and his priest friend were in their younger days. Their ancestors, Lance says, “lived from one great event to another, tragic events, with years of melancholy in between. We lost Vicksburg, got slaughtered at Shilo, fought duels, defied

18. Percy, Lancelot, 54. 19. Ibid., 43 (my emphasis).

Lancelot: What Do Survivors Do? 

203

Huey Long, and were bored to death between times.” 20 In his earlier years Lance was a man of action, a football hero idolized for his singular heroic deed—returning a kickoff more than a hundred yards against Alabama. Similarly, Father John acted “heroically” and became a missionary priest in Africa. After college, Lance married a virgin Southern belle and worked as a civil rights lawyer.21 But his football glory faded into memory, his wife, Lucy, died, and his social activism ended, leaving him a bored spectator of life, a “soured liberal” with “moderate views.” Father John returned from Africa a disenchanted priest, having suffered a nervous breakdown, from which he is now recovering. For his part, Lance sank into acedia—spiritual (and sexual) impotence—until his discovery of Margot’s adultery. The discovery, he claims, gave him a “new life” and new freedom to act. On one level, Lance sees his plan to videotape Margot’s adultery as an act of self-affirmation, a way to recover himself as a man of action. Like the underground man, Lance’s chance to prove himself via sexual intercourse will come later when he has sex with the whorish actress Raine Robinette.

6 Lance’s delusional claim to a “new life” and “new freedom” introduces a major theme in the novel: Percy’s concern with the loss of freedom or personal sovereignty in a culture increasingly enslaved by scientism, technology, and consumerism. (As we saw, the freedom/slavery theme was a central issue in the Crystal Palace section of Notes from Underground and in Grand Inquisitor fable in The Brothers Karamazov.) Percy offers a somber clue to this erosion when Lance and the priest see an attractive girl walking on the levee. She sings: Freedom’s just another word, Lord, for nothing   left to lose. Nothing ain’t worth nothing, Lord, but it’s free Feeling good was easy, Lord, when Bobby sang   the blues Feeling good was good enough for me Good enough for me and Bobby McGee.22 20. Ibid., 24. 21. Ibid., 61–62. 22. Ibid., 124–25.

204 

Walker Percy

The song, a 1960s counterculture favorite, was written by Kris Kristofferson and recorded by his former lover Janis Joplin, who died in 1970 of a heroin overdose, a suspected suicide. The lyrics capture the nihilism, despair, and erosion of spiritual meaning in a culture addicted to freedom as self-gratification. Nevertheless, by the end of the novel Lance, who is not free of his own demonic obsessions, will claim freedom (for upstanding men, at least) as a principal feature of his New Order of society. His claim for freedom in the New Order contradicts the Grand Inquisitor’s claim that human beings prefer slavery to freedom, but the despotism that results is the same—self-appointed “honorable” male rulers of Lance’s New Order in one case, the Inquisitor’s authoritarian church in the other. Lance’s New Order is a secular version of the kind of Catholic Church he claims to idealize, the authoritarian church-state of the medieval age. Lance’s crucial decision not to confront Margot directly points to a predicament that is both personal for him and, for Percy, cultural. On the cultural level, it points to the general predicament of a postmodern society in which belief in a universal moral order under God has been substantially eroded by relativism. Under these circumstances, personal freedom and authority come to be vested in the autonomous self, in individual will power, with the self trapped in a maze of competing “values,” interests, and strategic options. The situation echoes Dostoevsky’s grim conclusion, voiced by Ivan Karamazov, that without belief in God, “all things are permitted.” Freedom degenerates into license. For Lance in particular, the question of how to live and act with integrity in such a society is doubly complicated by his own moral complicity and loss of innocence. This truth is revealed when, after comparing his discovery of Margot’s adultery to an astronomer’s discovery, he compares it to the time as a child when he “discovered his father was a crook.” What he felt, he claims, was “not the usual emotions” of shock, anger, or shame, “which do not apply.” Rather, he discovered that “there is a kind of dread at the discovery but there is also a curious sense of expectancy, a secret sweetness at the core of dread.” 23 Lance’s feeling of “sweetness” is the delectation in evil of the voyeur-pornographer. “My eyes could not get enough of it. There was a secret savoring of it as if the eye were exploring it with its tongue,” as he earlier explored Margot’s 23. Ibid., 41 (my emphasis).

Lancelot: What Do Survivors Do? 

205

body with his tongue. His sensation is clearly erotic. He compares it to that of a detached onlooker at a violent accident or killing or death in the street, saying “there is no end to the feast.” As we recall, Stavrogin experienced a similar sweetness-in-dread in his perverse acts of violence and sexual exploitation, especially when he saw the hanged body of adolescent Matyrosha, his rape victim. Later, Lance admits that he felt the same “sweetness” when he discovered Margot’s infidelity. But Lance’s discovery of his father’s corruption also reveals his complicity in his parent’s dishonor, since he was sent by his mother, Lily, to “swipe” money from his father’s sock drawer.24 Lance’s discovery was a “fall” into the knowledge that theirs was not an honorable family. Their reputation as an honorable family is a sham. He sees that “things are not so nice,” and that “if there is one thing harder to bear than dishonor, it is honor, being brought up in a family where everything is so nice, perfect in fact, except of course oneself.” 25 After such knowledge, how does one recover from such a “fall”? More specifically, how does one recover lost honor, especially as in Lance’s and his father’s case, the dishonor of being a cuckold, a devastating blow to one’s sense of masculine honor? Although Lance sees the hypocrisy in his family’s sham reputation, his identity has been profoundly shaped by that code of honor. As we saw, the code expressed a classical, Stoic, pagan ideal; it had little or nothing to do with the Christian concepts of sin and redemption. In “Stoicism in the South” Percy argued that the pagan code of honor, overlaid with a veneer of Christian values, was the bedrock of Southern patrician society.26 However, the code was not exclusively Southern or patrician. It comported well—and still does—with the larger American myth of the autonomous self and individualism. The Stoic values of male solitariness, self-reliance, emotional detachment, and personal honor—what Percy called “the wintery kingdom of the self”—fit the larger cultural pattern, signified near the end of the novel by the image of the lone frontiersman facing West above 24. I have discussed this scene extensively in John F. Desmond, Walker Percy’s Search for Community (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 144–79. 25. Percy, Lancelot, 42. 26. Percy, “Stoicism in the South,” in Signposts in a Strange Land, ed., introduction Patrick Samway (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 83–89.

206 

Walker Percy

the Shenandoah Valley.27 Moreover, an essential component of the code, as we have seen, was the dualistic classification of women as “ladies” or “whores” that informed the patrician gentleman’s conduct. Lance’s character is profoundly shaped by that dualistic myth, which Percy parodied in Lance’s first sexual encounter with Margot, dressed as Southern “lady” while behaving whorishly in the pigeonnier at Belle Isle. Indeed, Lance is so invested in the code that he will later try to revive it by on the one hand transfiguring rape-victim Anna into the “New Eve” virgin of his New Order, and on the other by attempting to reclaim honor as a “man of action” by seducing actress Raine Robinette and engaging in a mock-duel with his rival Janos Jacoby and murdering him with a knife.

6 Faced with the truth of his loss of innocence and with Margot’s betrayal, Lance rationalizes his plot to spy on her by claiming that he is undertaking a “search for sin,” the “unholy Grail.” He claims that his search serves God’s purposes and is a “religious” search. “Can good come from evil?” he asks Father John. He concludes that “in times like these when everyone is wonderful, nobody bothers with God. Since evil is the clue to this age, it is the only quest appropriate to this age.” 28 Lance’s “search for sin” is not to be taken simply as a cynical goading of the priest. The erosion of the meaning of “sin” in postmodern society concerned Percy throughout his career. Binx Bolling, we recall, claimed that there was very little sin in the malaise. Along with Binx, both Will Barrett’s father and Sutter Vaught considered “paltriness,” not sin, as the besetting moral ill in society, a diagnosis Percy seems to have shared.29 The clue to Percy’s thought can be found in Kierkegaard. For Kierkegaard, “sin” is a knowing refusal to become a self “transparently under God.” Sin is despair, often a direct defiance of God and a refusal of humble repentance.30 “Sin” in this regard presupposes a conscious rejection of selfhood under God, a consciousness that Binx, lawyer Barrett, and Sutter do not find evident in 27. Percy, Lancelot, 237–38. 28. Ibid., 144–45. 29. See Percy’s comments on sin and paltriness in Lewis A. Lawson and Victor A. Kramer, eds., More Conversations with Walker Percy (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993), 141–42. 30. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death, 199–210.

Lancelot: What Do Survivors Do? 

207

modern American society. To them, and to Lance, sin as a knowing, willful offense against God seems to have degenerated into paltry behavior by citizens who are lotus-eaters. Viewed in this light, Lance’s search for sin can be seen as a serious, though misguided, quest. Granted, his rebellion against God is the measure of his despair, but his search also reveals his rage at the apparent loss of a coherent moral-spiritual order in society. His violent reaction is extreme and oversimplified, to be sure. But in further developing his treatment of the theme of sin, Percy also looked back to both Ivan Karamazov and Father Zosima’s conclusion that in a society where “all things are permitted,” there is “no crime and no sin.” 31 In Lance’s search and its aftermath, Percy traced out the dire implications of Dostoevsky’s prophetic insights about modern society. Lance’s search for sin by exposing Margot’s sexual sin fails utterly. He admits finally that he was unable to “see” sin. The reasons for his failure are complicated and have much to do with the kind of consciousness he brings to it, that is, his way of “seeing.” Again, Kierkegaard sheds light on Lance’s situation. For Kierkegaard, the opposite of sin is faith, not virtue. Like Ivan, Lance has some consciousness of God, but no faith. Sin is “against faith,” Kierkegaard says, and in the case of sexual sin, “sins of the flesh are a self-assertion of the lower self”; it is “not the wildness of the flesh and blood per se, but it is the spirit’s consent thereto.” 32 Therefore, sin is spiritual. But what if the “search for sin” is governed by a distorted, detached consciousness that seeks to subject matters of the spirit to tangible, empirical proof? As we have seen, Lance possesses such a detached consciousness. Thus his “search for sin” ends in total failure. He sees Margot’s body interacting with Jacoby’s, sees her as “flesh” and not spirit, which is largely the way he has viewed her throughout their relationship. His failure is the result of his deformed consciousness, which in turn unwittingly reveals his distrust, even hatred, of the flesh.

6 In developing the deeper meaning of Lance’s search for sin, Percy advanced the moral and philosophical implications of Dostoevsky’s characterization of the Grand Inquisitor and the shabby devil that haunts Ivan. Like the Grand 31. Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 315. 32. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death, 213 (my emphasis).

208 

Walker Percy

Inquisitor, Lance takes on a satanic role, as I have argued elsewhere.33 Satan’s role is to promote destruction and self-destruction, as Rowan Williams has shown. Percy advanced the theme in Lancelot by showing how the satanic impulse is manifested in Lance’s warped view of sex, a product to his distorted consciousness. Lance’s comparison of the sex act to possession by Satan earlier in the novel serves as a clue to his hatred of the body. One way to understand the philosophical significance of his thought vis-à-vis sexuality is to compare his situation to Ivan’s encounter with the shabby devil.34 Lance’s claim that his search for sin is a possible proof of God’s existence echoes the shabby devil’s reply when Ivan doubts his reality. “After all,” the devil answers, “who knows whether a proof of the devil is also a proof of God.” 35 The shabby devil’s plan is to completely confuse Ivan about whether he, the devil, is real, or is simply Ivan’s hallucination. In his devious argument, he complains because he is pure spirit and because he longs to be incarnated in a body, even that of a “two hundred and fifty pound merchant’s wife.” 36 He blames “them,” the fates or God (he claims that he is “not sure” if God exists), for his bodiless condition and for the determined everlasting role “they” have imposed on him. His story, of course, is a lie, ignoring the fact that he chose to rebel against God and thereby suffered the loss of freedom. The lie also masks his envy and hatred of the human, bodily condition, especially—though he slyly does not mention it—because God as Christ chose freely to become incarnate to free humans from bondage to sin and death. Christ’s incarnation is a mystery, the mystery of spirit-in-flesh, a “secret” that the shabby devil cannot fathom; it transcends rational comprehension. Despite his claim that he desires incarnation, the shabby devil hates bodily existence and wishes to destroy it by taking possession of the self and driving it to alienation, violence, madness, and suicide. To advance his destructive goal, he tries to “disincarnate” Ivan further by confusing him about what is real and what is illusion. His goal is to lead Ivan into even deeper abstracted alienation and self-doubt. To this end he quotes Descartes to confirm his own bodiless state (“I think, therefore I am”) 33. See Desmond, “Fyodor Dostoevsky, Walker Percy and the Demonic Self,” Southern Literary Review (Spring 2012): 88–107. 34. Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov, part 4, chap. 9, 634–50. 35. Ibid., 637. 36. Ibid., 639.

Lancelot: What Do Survivors Do? 

209

and encourages the rationalist tendency already in Ivan to identify “self” solely with abstract consciousness, separate from bodily existence. In this dualism, bodily existence is denigrated as inferior or corrupt. For the devil, as Williams also points outs, the body becomes an object of hatred and self-hatred. As is well known, Percy pointed to Descartes as “the enemy” because his dualism fostered this abstracted view of reality.37 Lance’s search for sin follows the path of the shabby devil’s insidious argument and is motivated by a similarly dualistic, anti-incarnate spirit, and, ultimately, a hatred of the human body. Implicitly, the shabby devil’s plot against Ivan reinforces Ivan’s contempt for mankind in general and for the notion that mature love between individual persons is impossible. As we saw, Ivan claims that only children are innocent; adults are universally corrupt, irrational, and violent, “a beast in every heart.” Like the shabby devil, he discounts any notion of a benevolent God of mercy and forgiveness and the human capacity for love, grace, and redemption. The shabby devil argues that his own fate is determined by the “absent” God or fate. Ivan rejects belief in a God who indifferently allows the torture and murder of innocent children. To him, this is the universal pattern of history, a pattern determined by God. Moreover, as Rowan Williams points out, a key component in the devil’s strategy—implicit in the shabby devil and more explicitly in the Grand Inquisitor—is his endorsement of a “perpetual childhood,” a mythic state of innocence outside time and therefore not subject to natural growth into adult sexuality. In effect, the devil endorses a state of “death-like harmony.” 38 The goal, then, is to keep supposedly innocent children as pre-sexual beings under the rule of a dictatorial leader, denying their growth into maturity, adult freedom, and responsibility. Or in the case of mature, sexual adults, the goal is to reduce them to the status of children to be manipulated and controlled, as the Grand Inquisitor proposes in his imagined future society.

6 Lance’s attitude toward Margot in their early years together echoes the shabby devil’s attempt to “disincarnate” the real self—the self as a spiritual/ 37. See Percy’s comments on Descartes in Lawson and Kramer, Conversations with Walker Percy (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985), 130–33. 38. Williams, Dostoevsky, 79.

210 

Walker Percy

physical entity—in perversely dualistic fashion. As we have seen, Lance initially treats her as an idealized combination of “lady” and “whore.” Beneath the lady-like costume she wears, Margot is, to Lance, a sexual “feast.” He apotheosizes her body as a “sacrament” that he “eats,” a perversion of the Eucharistic sacrament, the indwelling of Christ in flesh. Lance’s idealizing of Margot’s flesh-as-flesh becomes an anti-incarnation that debases the body as the locus of the mystery of the human person. In short, Lance does not truly regard Margot as a person. She is his “possession” and sex object, a role he has mythologized to fulfill his prurient, childish sex fantasy, one that Margot willingly fulfills for her own selfish purposes. Lance’s sexual “child” fetish is also shown in his suspicion that Margot’s father, Tex, may have tampered with Lance’s youngest daughter, Siobhan. Initially, Margot acts as a compliant sex “child” for Lance until she tires of the dehumanizing role and rebels against it as an autonomous woman who claims an independent identity, sexual and otherwise. Lance’s reaction to Margot’s perfidy, coupled with his ambivalence toward woman and the physical body, is to construct what he grandiosely calls a “sexual theory of history,” including a “prototype of the New Woman.” 39 Lance’s theory, ridiculously simplistic as it is, may owe something to Dostoevsky’s ambivalence toward the emerging autonomous woman struggling for independence against the nineteenth-century stereotypes of the female social role as passive, domesticated housewife and mother. Signs of this appear in strong female characters such as Nastasya Filippovna, Aglaya Epauchin, Katerina Verkhovtsev, and Grushenka Svetlov. And like other nineteenth-century writers, Dostoevsky developed the conventional theme of the redemption of the fallen woman, a theme parodied, as I noted, in Notes from Underground, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov. Lance’s fantasy of the “New Woman” with rape-victim Anna as prototype combines both of these themes. According to his sexual theory, history is divided into three periods: a Romantic period when “one fell in love,” a “sexual period” of flagrant promiscuity where men and women “cohabit as indiscriminately as in a baboon colony—or a soap opera,” and a “post-catastrophe” future when love with a chastened “New Woman” becomes possible.40 39. Percy, Lancelot, 37–38. 40. Ibid., 38.

Lancelot: What Do Survivors Do? 

211

As a pessimist about postmodern sexual relations, Percy seems to have shared something of Lance’s ideas, especially when we consider one possible source for those ideas, travestied to be sure in Lance’s theory. In theologian Romano Guardini’s prophetic work The End of the Modern World, quoted as epigraph to The Last Gentleman, Guardini forecast the catastrophic collapse of the modern social order, the death of love, and the return to a kind of “desert,” from which nevertheless a new and honest love between “two lonely people” will be possible. Such new and honest love will be centered in Christ’s abiding love of mankind.41 In Guardini’s vision of the post-apocalypse, the “unbeliever will emerge from the fog of secularism” so that “loneliness in faith” will be possible. This is a radically different vision from the future world Lance envisions for him and Anna in his “New Order.” In his dream of their future life, Lance imagines their relationship as postsexual. He imagines them working together and picnicking in their post-catastrophe world. “We’re making a new life. There was no thought of ‘romance’ or ‘sex’ but only of making a new life.” Lance’s dream is of a Gnostic paradise, reminiscent of Svidigalov’s dream before his suicide. Lance envisions a new postsexual Eden beyond the complexities of history and the complications of ordinary adult sexual relations. In short, it offers a return to a state of childhood innocence, a timeless world in which natural development is aborted. Lance maintains that the “old worlds” of “romance” and bestial cohabitation will have collapsed, and so he asks, legitimately, “What do survivors do?” 42 He is of course referring to himself and Anna as survivors of their catastrophic pasts, but for Percy the question has much broader significance. Percy is posing the deeper question: What do survivors of the “catastrophe” of postmodern self-consciousness do after the deformations of ideology have replaced faith in God and the moral authority vested in him? Lance’s answer to the question is played out, disastrously, in his subsequent actions. Infuriated by what he regards as the collapse of a coherent moral and metaphysical order, Lance rages against a culture that permits all forms of decadent behavior.43 He condemns homosexuals, hypocritical preachers, 41. Romano Guardini, The End of the Modern World, trans. Joseph Theman and Herbert Burke, ed., introduction Frederick D. Wilhelmsen (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1968), 132–33. 42. Percy, Lancelot, 39. 43. Ibid., 144–46, 163–68.

212 

Walker Percy

promiscuous youth, immoral and sentimental denizens of Hollywood, and so on. Echoing Dostoevsky (and Myshkin and the Grand Inquisitor), Lance blames Christianity in the West, and specifically the Catholic Church.44 Whereas Dostoevsky condemned the church for its grasp of temporal power, personified in the Grand Inquisitor, Lance condemns the church for what he sees as its feckless role in the general moral collapse. He faults the church for its nuanced stand on sin and sexual relations, which on the one hand recognizes adultery as a sin against God and man, and on the other hand judges the gravity of the offense depending on individual cases, while emphasizing the need for repentance and forgiveness of the sinner. All this is too ambiguous and subtle for an absolutist like Lance. It mocks the self-righteous, puritanical moralist in him. Instead of the contemporary church, Lance proposes a romantic fiction—a return to the medieval church of Charlemagne and the “broadsword” values of an all-powerful ecclesiastical-secular order with a clear-cut moral system based on the Stoic values of honor, courage, and, in sexual relations, a clear distinction between ladies and whores. His nostalgic dream of such an order is, of course, a delusion, an impossible dream in the contemporary, post-Christian world. Even if such an ideal order ever existed (which it did not), it is totally irrelevant to the epistemological and spiritual crisis now facing a technologically advanced, ideology-driven world. Earlier, Lance tried to argue that sexual intercourse is the only “earthly infinity.” Yet he condemns the indiscriminate coupling he sees going on in the culture. He reports that teenagers do not even count intercourse as one of their top ten experiences. His wife, Margot, tells him that men make too much of sexual intercourse; Lance admits that women seem not to take it nearly as seriously as men. So much for his attempt to elevate it to an “earthly infinity.” Lance’s condemnation is, of course, hypocritical, since he has sexually indulged himself and will soon have intercourse with the actress Raine, partly out of revenge for her and Troy Dana’s seduction of his daughter Lucy. Like the underground man’s relations with the prostitute Lisa, Lance’s relations with Raine are for him a way to exact revenge and to assert his masculine power over a woman. 44. Ibid., 188–90.

Lancelot: What Do Survivors Do? 

213

The core of Lance’s spiritual predicament is human sexuality itself. Thus he damns God for giving human beings a sexual nature at all; that is, a life as incarnate beings destined to grow into adulthood with all the challenges of erotic longing, freedom, and responsibility to become mature moral agents in their relations with each other. Instead, Lance longs for a world of “innocent” pre-sexual humans. Raging against God, Lance’s diatribe reveals his unconscious hatred of his own sexual nature, as I have said. The innocence of children. Didn’t your God say that unless you become as innocent as one of those, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven? Yes, but what does that mean? It is obvious he made a mistake or else played a very bad trick on us. Yes, I remember the innocence of childhood. Very good! But then after a while one makes a discovery. One discovers there is a little secret God didn’t let us in on. One discovers your Christ never did tell us about it. Yet God himself so arranged it that you wake up one fine morning with a great thundering hard-on and wanting nothing more in life than a sweet hot cunt to put it in, drive some girl, any girl, into the ground, and where is the innocence of that? Is that part of the innocence? If so, he should have said so. From child to assailant through no doing of one’s own—is that God’s plan for us? Damn you and your God.45

His diatribe especially reveals his hatred of women’s sexuality, their seemingly wayward sexual appetites, and their duplicitous semblance of ladyhood as a mask for actual whorishness. Lance’s dualistic mental pattern developed early in his strained relationship with his cold, aggressive mother, Lily, who used to jab him in the ribs as a child, and who in a “dream vision” hands Lance the knife with which to murder Jacoby and avenge woman’s dishonor. Ironically, her own suspected affair with his Uncle Harry is later confirmed. But if woman as a sexual being is perfidious, what can Lance do about it now, given the natural sexual appetites of all women and men, including him? His strategy is double-stranded. One strand is his attempt to “recreate” and redeem the adult woman as “innocent” child, his goal vis-à-vis rape victim Anna. The second strand is to take revenge against 45. Ibid., 188.

214 

Walker Percy

a woman-violator of his romantic vision of “innocence,” the actress Raine Robinette. In Lance’s mind, as we shall see, Raine is a corrupted “child”whore; his sexual intercourse with her becomes an act of symbolic “child” molestation. Percy was always fascinated by ways to overcome or temporarily blot out the debilitating or morally paralyzing effects of postmodern selfconsciousness through amnesia, alcohol, drugs, or electroshock treatment. Like Dostoevsky, he was also deeply interested in the possibilities of developing a new consciousness, which Dostoevsky held out for Raskolnikov and Dmitri Karamazov. The possibilities for a new consciousness range from the religious, seen for example in Zosima, to the demonically nihilistic, in Kirilov. Percy seemed particularly interested in the erasure of the past and the formation of a new consciousness as regards women, such as Anna in Lancelot and Allie Huger in The Second Coming. Thus Lance creates the fantasy that Anna has been purified by the gang-rape, and so she can now become the “New Woman” of his Third Order of society, his projected future Utopia-Eden.46 But Percy undercuts Lance’s fantasy of the New Eve and their future life together to reveal its perverse significance when Lance tries to reinvent Anna as a “child.” According to Lance, Anna’s former self, her old self-consciousness, has been destroyed by the gang rape. Locked in her cell and refusing to eat, she is virtually catatonic. Lance describes her as curled up in bed “like a child” and feeds her candy as he would a child. Gradually he coaxes her to “speak” by using a tapping code on the wall, in one sense a kindness on his part, but in another sense a way to manipulate her as a “child,” a plan that will backfire. The key here is Lance’s attempt to infantilize and desexualize Anna, to recreate and control her as a child. When he visualizes their future life together, as we saw, he imagines a bucolic life of working and relaxing together, but with no thoughts of romance or sex, but only a “new life.”47 Given Lance’s fear and hatred of sexual ambiguities, his fantasy of innocence seems plausible, as long as Anna obeys him. But what if she refuses the role of obedient, prepubescent child and instead claims a fully mature identity? The answer comes when Lance proposes his plan to Anna and she vehemently rejects it. “Are you suggesting that I, 46. Ibid., 37–39. 47. Ibid., 39.

Lancelot: What Do Survivors Do? 

215

myself, me, my person, can be violated by a man? You goddamn men. Don’t you know that there are more important things in this world? Next you’ll be telling me that despite myself I liked it.” 48 What if Lance’s own ambivalent sexual longings erupt as well, as they have in his attempt to make sexual ecstasy with Margot an absolute? This longing for the perfect mate reveals both his latent desire as a child predator and his longing to return as a child to the ideal mother, the source of his sexual being, a longing made impossible by Lily’s known infidelity. It is difficult to fathom the psychological depth of Lance’s motives. Does he desire union with the “pure” mother-woman, or does he desire revenge against her? Or both? Given this volatile combination of psychic forces and his desire to control Anna, it is not hard to imagine, perhaps even predict, that Lance will at some point resent Anna’s freedom and sexually assault her as a way to manifest his power over her. We recall in this context his reductive view of sexuality in his interpretation of historical evolution—that woman was created to submit to man’s sexual desire and that “the great secret of life is rape.” 49 In short, he seems likely to become a “child” molester like Svidrigalov or Stavrogin. Anna’s name signifies grace, suggesting the possibility that she might eventually, through her love, lead Lance out of the solipsistic hell of egoism he currently inhabits, though such a prospect seems rather dim in the novel. Even after she rebukes him for trying to reduce her to a child, he still insists on his New Order of society, ironically based on the old, hypocritical Stoic order of his parents’ generation, when men classified women as either “lady” or “whore.” True to this heritage, Lance proclaims that if women object to this system, “to hell with them; they will have no choice in the matter.” 50 So much for Lance’s claim of freedom in the new order. The second strand of Lance’s strategy for action, one that may ominously forecast his future relations with Anna, is his vengeful copulation with the actress Raine Robinette. Percy stages the scene carefully as an ironic counterpoint to his imagining of Anna as a child. Lance knows from the videotape that Raine and Troy Dana have sexually molested his willing daughter Lucy. Lucy is a stupid, naïve girl dumbstruck by the aura of the 48. Ibid., 272. 49. Ibid., 239. 50. Ibid., 191.

216 

Walker Percy

actors, but she is not morally innocent. Nevertheless, Lance thinks of her as a child to fuel his revenge against the actress, though he is also both attracted to and repelled by Raine’s enticing sexuality. Lance knows from Lucy’s willing participation in the ménage-à-trois that his daughter is not an innocent child. Nevertheless, his intercourse with Raine will count as revenge for her having violated his ideal of innocent childhood. It will also be a way to demonstrate his revived sexual potency, long dormant since he and Margot have drifted apart, and to reclaim his lost honor as a powerful male. When Lance encounters her, Raine is half-drunk from a mixture of alcohol and drugs. She begins to fondle him, and he responds. She reminds him, he says, of a “fourteen-year-old girl” (as he first thought of Anna as a twelve-year-old girl) and when she lies face down on the bed, “the pillow mashing her lips sideways,” she looks to him “like a child.” 51 Raine begins to babble about her childhood growing up in West Virginia and how her mother prostituted herself to buy Raine a dress. Rising over her, Lance enters her from behind, like a molester assaulting a faceless young girl victim. Later, Lance and the actress have intercourse again, this time face-to-face. Both are “alone and watchful,” watching each other. “No longer children were we but adults and watchful, which comes of being adults.” 52 But Lance is not interested in any loving act of mutual self-giving with an adult woman. Rather, he sees their intercourse as a contest, a power struggle, a sexual duel—a “probing of her secret, the secret which I had to find out and she wanted me to find out.” 53 Lance believes he can “know” Raine’s secret self, the mystery of her being, by probing her sexually. He wishes to “take possession” of her and “destroy” her, as Satan seeks possession of a person’s soul to destroy them spiritually. In typical rationalist fashion, Lance tries to reduce mystery to empirical terms. In his deformed mind, their intercourse is a competition for dominance. “We were going to know each other but one of us would know first and therefore win.” To “win,” for Lance, is to induce her climactic orgasm before his. To him, sex is a power used to overcome and “defeat” the partner. “She lost,” he proudly reports. “When I found out, the secret, she closed her eyes and curled 51. Ibid., 241. 52. Ibid., 254. 53. Ibid., 254–55.

Lancelot: What Do Survivors Do? 

217

around me like a burning leaf.” 54 But the mystery of the individual self—the secret self—is inviolable, as Anna tried to tell Lance. The secret self can only be known, ultimately, by God. Just as Lance is unable to fathom the secret of Raine’s inviolable self, so also is he unable to discover the nature of sin, the goal of his larger search. Shortly after describing his intercourse with Raine, Lance admits to Father John that when he saw Margot and Jacoby copulating, “I didn’t see what I wanted to see after all.” As Kierkegaard said, “No man by himself and of himself can explain what sin is, precisely because he is in sin.” Evil (sin) is a mystery that cannot be known by human intelligence alone. It requires faith. “Comprehension is coterminous with man’s relation to the human, but faith is man’s relation to the divine.” 55 Only through revealed faith can man begin to understand the depths of sin, a faith that the despairing Lance, who refuses to admit any personal sin, has long abandoned. With his distorted rationalist approach, he has turned the search outward into a reductive quest for empirical evidence, rather than inward toward his own heart and mind. Furthermore, Lance’s description of sexual intercourse as an “earthly infinity” might hold true if mutual love were at the heart of the union, but such is not the case with Raine or with Margot. Having failed in his search for sin, Lance turns to violence as a way to reclaim the powerful self. After taking his revenge on Raine, Lance the moralist moves to discover the principal defilers of his personal honor— Margot and Jacoby. He takes the path of the possessed demonic self, the devil as avenger. Percy stages the scene of Lance’s discovery of the culprits as a parody of the stoic code of honor held by his brutal “heroic” ancestors—a “duel” whereby Lance can reenact the role as an honorable man of action. He savagely murders his rival Jacoby, cutting his throat, and then tries to persuade Margot to start a new life together with him. But she pointedly rejects his offer. Half delirious, she begins rambling about “being a child in Texas,” echoing Raine’s memories of childhood in West Virginia, but Margot is clear-headed enough to rebuke Lance. “That’s what you never knew. With you I had to be either—or—but never—uh—woman.” Their brief colloquy ends with the sudden explosion of Belle Isle mansion. 54. Ibid., 255. 55. Ibid., 255, 225, 226.

218 

Walker Percy

Recalling the explosion later, Lance declares that “I was moved off the dead center of my life like Lucifer blown out of hell, great wings spread against the starlight.” In this image, Percy suggests that the forces of evil, cast out of heaven, have been let loose in the world. Lance’s failed quest has led him to a spiritual impasse, a state of despair that Percy implies is the plight of the deformed, autonomous postmodern consciousness. He knows that his search for sin has failed, but Lance also knows that he is sick, spiritually “dead.” “I don’t feel anything—except a slight curiosity. I feel nothing now except a certain coldness.” 56 Lance seems to intuit his own despair, his “sickness unto death,” which may, as Kierkegaard says, open him to a conversion of heart and mind. Lance needs to recognize his sinful self and seek repentance, as Porfiry advised Raskolnikov and Bishop Tikhon advised Stavrogin to do. He also needs the love and help of others. Doestoevsky was able to show the importance of Porfiry, Zosima, and Tikhon as figures of spiritual authority—like Percy’s apostolic “news bearers” Sr. Johnette Vianney, Father Boomer, and Father Rinaldo Smith—who could speak the truth to their confused protagonists. But no such figure of authority is shown explicitly in Lancelot, which is Percy’s somber comment on the general spiritual malaise of the times. Lance’s friend Father John is an authoritative figure-in-waiting, but he does not speak directly in the novel until the last few pages, though Percy leaves clear at the end that he has “something to tell” Lance and will speak to his desperate friend. Lance also needs grace, signified by Anna’s name, the independent woman who agrees to follow him to Virginia after she is released from the Center. She is Percy’s sign of hope, like Dostoevsky’s Sonya Marmeladov, the hope that through her love and Father John’s counsel Lance may yet turn away from his suicidal path. Through others’ love and through grace, Lance might gain the spiritual freedom he wrongly claimed for his Gnostic community in Virginia. He might even, as in Kierkegaard, discover his true self, his true identity “transparently under God.” But as yet Lance is unrepentant. “No confession forthcoming,” he tells Father John. He refuses to see his own complicity in evil, his deceit, hatred, self-hatred, and murderous violence. The answer to the question he asks the priest, “Why did I discover nothing at the heart of evil?,” is double56. Ibid., 265, 266, 274.

Lancelot: What Do Survivors Do? 

219

edged.57 Lance does not find a rational answer to his search for sin; he finds nothing of sin that he can objectively verify. Lance also fails to see the demonic impulse that possesses and drives his spirit. The devil, as Williams points out, is the internal force of self-deceit, the force that disguises the true self from itself.58 Blind to this force, Lance denies evil altogether. “There was no ‘secret’ after all, no discovery, no flickering of interest, nothing at all, not even any evil. So I have nothing to ask you after all because there is no answer. There is no question. There is no Unholy Grail just as there was no Holy Grail.” 59 In their final exchange Lance proposes an “either/or” set of alternatives to Father John, who has resumed his vocation as a priest and plans a return to parish work dispensing the sacraments in Alabama. Lance argues that contemporary America has become a “Sodom,” a moral cesspool, and that if God exists, he will allow its destruction or self-destruction. In this view, Lance sees society as totally corrupt, unredeemable, and without hope, grace, love, mercy, and forgiveness. His view reveals his self-hatred and despair. He also rejects the sacramental view of reality that though the world is tainted by sin, it is nevertheless potentially redeemable by divine grace, the power implicit in Father John’s humble return to priestly ministry. Instead, Lance will choose a third alternative—to start a “new world” of autonomous men like himself who will resurrect the ancient stoic code of honor, even if it takes the violence of “the sword.” But Percy qualifies the antinomy, the either/or, when Lance says, “I’ll wait and give your God time,” and guesses that the priest “knows something you think I don’t know.” Father John agrees that indeed he does have “something to tell” Lance and will now speak directly to him. In this dialectical ending, Percy balances the open-ended ending of the novel on the fulcrum between hope and despair, while clearly implying that the present state of postmodern society, largely in thrall to the demonic forces of egoistic autonomy, materialism, sexual aggression, and violence, was headed for the disaster of spiritual suicide. In Father John’s humble return to parish ministry Percy also suggested, as did Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard, that a turn to the Christian faith was the only true solution to the self’s spiritual malaise. 57. Ibid., 274, 275. 58. Williams, Dostoevsky, 68. 59. Percy, Lancelot, 274–75.

220 

Walker Percy

Chap ter 11 The Second Coming Finding Home

In the last chapter, on Lancelot, I quoted the conclusion of Romano Guardini’s The End of the Modern World to suggest how Percy saw Lance Lamar’s predicament to represent, in extremis, the predicament of almost all citizens in a postmodern technological society. Describing the end of the modern world, Guardini wrote: Loneliness in faith will be terrible. Love will disappear from the face of the public world [Mt 8] . . . , but the more precious will be that love which flows from one lonely person to another, involving a courage of the heart born from the immediacy of the love of God as it was made known in Christ. Perhaps man will come to discover this love anew, to taste the sovereignty of its origin, to know its independence of the world, to sense the mystery of its final why? Perhaps love will achieve an intimacy and harmony never known to this day. Perhaps it will gain what lies hidden in the key words of the providential message of Jesus: that things are transformed for the man who make’s God’s Will for His Kingdom his first concern. [Mt 6:33]

Guardini went on to underscore the significance of the postmodern situation. The “eschatological conditions,” he argues, will be revealed in the “religious temper” of the times. He disavows any “facile apocalyptic,” recalling that Christ himself said that no one except “the Father knows the

221

day and the hour [Mt. 14:36]. . . . He rejects any idea of the “nearness (of the end) in the sense of time”; rather, he affirms “nearness as it pertains to the essence of the End,” when “man’s existence is now nearing an absolute decision.” The decision for or against God’s kingdom is the essential choice facing the postmodern world.1 The essential choice is the one facing protagonists Will Barrett and Alison Huger in The Second Coming. As if taking his cue from Guardini’s prophesy, Percy set out to write what he later called “the first unalienated novel since War and Peace,” the story of two lonely “survivors” who overcome personal apocalypses to form a loving bond together and commit themselves to work to better the shattered world in which they find themselves.2 In their loving union, they find an answer to the question asked by Lance Lamar (and by Percy): “What do survivors do?” Of all Percy’s novels, The Second Coming would seem to have the least in common with the major Dostoevsky fictions discussed in this study. Percy’s fifth novel has been correctly classified as a romantic allegory or fantasy, a tale of love and rebirth with a serendipitous ending. It is also a Christian comedy, the story of two souls’ triumph through their mutual love over the threat of isolation and self-destruction each face. Nevertheless, Percy’s romance continues to echo and advance major themes and motifs from Dostoevsky’s major fictions, as I shall argue in this chapter. I refer specifically to the central themes of apocalypse and suicide; the attack on exclusive secular humanism; the importance of the satanic figure and that of the authoritative news-bearer; the emergence of a “new consciousness”; the vital role of woman in a regenerative love relationship; and Percy’s important use of the underground/cave motif in Will’s challenge to God. The Second Coming also takes up and resolves themes left unresolved in Percy’s earlier novels. Prominent among them are the themes of suicide and postmodern sexual dysfunction. Regarding suicide, Will recollects the full truth of his father’s plan to murder him during their hunting trip and the elder Barrett’s subsequent suicide. More importantly, he names the meaninglessness and despair underlying his father’s suicide. As well, he 1. Romano Guardini, The End of the Modern World, trans. Joseph Theman and Herbert Burke, ed., introduction Frederick D. Wilhelmsen (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1968), 132. 2. Lewis A. Lawson and Victor A. Kramer, eds., Conversations with Walker Percy (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985), 235.

222 

Walker Percy

discovers his own inherited death wish and life-long attempt to evade it. Will also intuits and names the death wish haunting his immediate society and rejects it. For her part, Allie Huger’s solo attempt to escape alienation from her society has been psychologically suicidal, but she begins to overcome it though love with Will. Percy casts their modest triumph over suicide and the deathly existence of their contemporaries in specifically Christian terms by a balancing of apocalyptic and eschatological perspectives, as we shall see. His successful resolution of the suicide theme, at least in this novel, looks back to the inconclusive treatment of this theme in Kate Cutrer, Sutter Vaught, Dr. Tom More, and the spiritual suicide Lance Lamar. At the same time, his analysis of the suicide theme again echoes and deepens Dostoevsky’s treatment of literal and spiritual suicide in Svidrigalov, Smerdyakov, Kirilov, and Stavrogin. In The Second Coming Percy also imagined a resolution to the theme of sexual dysfunction by presenting an idyllic paradigm of joyful sexual and spiritual communion of mind, word, and body in the love of Will and Allie. Sexual tensions plague Percy’s earlier couples: Binx and Kate, young Will and Kitty, Sutter and Rita, Tom More and Ellen, Lance and Margot, Lance and rape victim Anna. What is especially unique in The Second Coming is Percy’s integration of the themes of sexual dysfunction and suicide to reveal how both are rooted in egotism and despair, which can be overcome by love and charity. Will and Allie’s harmonious sexual union, idealized as it is, represents a potentially salubrious resolution of these conflicts. We find no such serendipity in the major Dostoevsky works I have examined, though the possibility for it exists in the union of Dunya Raskolnikov and Razumikhin, Sonja and Raskolnikov, and Dmitri Karamazov and Grushenka Svetlov. In Will and Allie’s union Percy also imagined an overcoming of the isolation and alienation of the rationalist “autonomous” self, the latter which we saw as a major figure in Dostoevsky’s fiction (the underground man, Ivan Karamazov, Stavrogin, Kirilov). Percy developed this triumph by creating a healing bond of love and charity between Will and Allie and by their commitment to the community in need. Spiritually and psychologically, both emerge from their singular ordeals with a new consciousness grounded in humility, love, and concern for others. This is precisely the

The Second Coming: Finding Home 

223

kind of new consciousness Porfiry told Raskolnikov he must develop, that the elder monk Zosima preached in his writings, and that Bishop Tikhon told Stavrogin was the only solution to his isolation, despair, and spiritual suicide.3 Later in the novel, Percy symbolically linked Will and Allie’s development of a new consciousness to the transformation of mind and heart made possible by Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, explicated by St. Paul in his vision of the “new man” in Christ (Cor 15:12–28; Eph 4:17–24). In developing Will’s new consciousness Percy counterbalanced Will’s (and his own) apocalyptic thought patterns with an emerging eschatological consciousness, as I shall discuss later. This new mode of thinking leads Will to become a useful “man of action” in society while he continues his unflagging search for signs of God. His commitment to the “here-and-now” ordinary world reverses the Gnostic apocalyptic of Lance Lamar’s escapist dream of a New Order of society. For her part, Allie emerges as Percy’s version of a “new woman” who overcomes the crippling social paternalism to affirm her freedom and independence of mind (like rape victim Anna), while finding in Will another person with whom to share her love and care.

6 References to “The Revelation to John” abound in Dostoevsky’s fiction. In Raskolnikov’s prison nightmare an apocalyptic plague of “spirits endowed with reason and will” and the madness of “scientific conclusions” sweep Europe and destroy all coherent truth, moral convictions, and the social order. Violence, disease, and famine sweep the earth; only a few of the “pure and chosen” survive to start a “new race.” 4 In The Idiot, the garrulous Lebedev tries to convince Nastasya that they are living “in the time of the third horse, the black one,” the symbol of famine in John’s revelation, to be followed by “a pale horse and him whose name is Death.” 5 He foresees no second coming of Christ, no parousia. The cause of this catastrophe, Leb3. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans., introduction David Magarshack (New York: Penguin, 1951), 471–73; Demons, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, introduction Joseph Frank (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), 712–13; The Brothers Karamazov, trans., annotated Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 313–20. 4. Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, 555–56. 5. Dostoevsky, The Idiot, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, introduction Richard Pevear (New York: Vintage, 2003), 374–75, 380–81.

224 

Walker Percy

edev claims, is that all human relations have been reduced to economic exchanges, with people “seeking their rights” for material gain alone. In a later conversation with Prince Myshkin and others, he sees the spread of the network of railroads as a sign of the “general whole, scientific and practical” approach to existence that threatens “the wellsprings of life.” He links the “cursed” spread of the railroads to “Wormwood” (the Apocalypse’s Satan) and condemns “you atheists, men of science, industry, associations, salaries, and the rest” for their claim that they can create universal peace and happiness by material progress alone (“of necessity”), without any moral foundation. Lebedev sees human nature as a struggle between laws of self-preservation and self-destruction, the latter driven by the devil. The current age is engaged in an apocalyptic struggle between these forces, and again referring to John’s revelation, he says, “The devil rules over mankind until a limit in time still unknown to us.” (In The Thanatos Syndrome, Fr. Rinaldo Smith will make a similar point about twentieth-century Western civilization.) Lebedev warns that the current “madness” of godless materialism and “enlightenment” secular progressivism in Russia may muddy “the wellsprings of life”—that is, individual conscience and freedom—and lead to universal destruction.6 In Lebedev’s warning, Dostoevsky expressed a theme Percy would also develop later: the “apocalypse” in consciousness— Lebedev’s word is “thought”—that can occur when citizens’ individuality is subsumed by the ideologies of scientism, technocracy, material progress, and consumerism. In Demons, Dostoevsky’s anathema against the apocalyptic trends in “sick” Russia is expressed most poignantly in the dying Stefan Trofimovich’s request for a reading of the angel’s warning to the church in Laodicia in “The Revelation to John.” The warning—“I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot!,” condemns those neither firm Christians nor firm atheists, the “lukewarm” who will be “spewed out” by Christ at the last judgment.7 Trofimovich condemns himself along with the whole feckless society in the novel, as well as the nihilist revolutionaries. Yet he (and Dostoevsky) concludes with the miracle of Christ driving the demons into the swine and destroying them, the dying man’s hope that such a miracle will 6. Ibid., 374, 375, 380–81. 7. Dostoevsky, Demons, 655.

The Second Coming: Finding Home 

225

drive “all the big and little demons accumulated in our great and sick man, Russia,” so that “the sick man will be healed and sit at the feet of Jesus.” 8 These are only a few of the most important allusions to “The Revelation to John” in Dostoevsky’s writing, and I include them to provide a context for Percy’s development of similar themes in The Second Coming, along with the other themes I have mentioned. Percy begins to develop the apocalyptic theme from the beginning of the novel when protagonist Will Barrett suffers a kind of inner “apocalypse” and inexplicably starts falling on the golf course.9 Will’s collapse triggers disjointed thoughts, memories, and psychological disturbances. He begins to feel that his successful career as a rich, well-honored citizen has been a sham and that his current life and that of his friends are “farcical,” a gross self-deception and diversion from authentic existence.10 Will’s seizures produce “the opposite of amnesia,” such that “he remembers everything.” Two important memories haunt his disturbed mind. The first is the memory of his youthful sexual longing for a Jewish classmate, Ethel Rosenblum, associated with a triangular-shaped patch of weedy ground where “once he saw (her) and wanted her so bad he fell down.” 11 Percy uses a Peircean triad to link Will’s adolescent lust for the Jewess to his current delusion that “the Jews” may be leaving North Carolina (they obviously aren’t), which suggests to him that the apocalyptic end of the world may be soon at hand. The symbolic link between memory and delusion reveals Will’s own apocalyptic state of mind. Percy revealed the major source of Will’s apocalyptic consciousness in the second crucial memory triggered by his collapse: a recollection of his early hunting trip with his father and of their fateful relationship. In The Last Gentleman young Will recalled the evening before his father’s suicide when he listened to him rage about the collapse of moral values, particularly its sexual promiscuity, in the new generation. In despair at the collapse 8. Ibid. 9. Walker Percy, The Second Coming (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), 4. 10. For a discussion of Percy’s use of the theme of time, see the following: Lewis A. Lawson’s two essays in Following Percy (Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1988): “Time and Eternity in The Moviegoer”, 108–23, and “Gnosis and Time in Lancelot,” 210–27. See also Edward J. Dupuy’s brilliant discussion, “Repetition and Bios: Surviving Life in a Century of Gnosticism and Death,” in Autobiography in Walker Percy: Repetition, Recovery, and Redemption (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 89–121. 11. Percy, Second Coming, 9, 8.

226 

Walker Percy

of the old social order, the elder Barrett saw no alternative for an “honorable” man but the ultimate Stoic gesture—suicide. Young Will suffered the effects of his father’s suicide, but he was unaware at the time that his father had planned to kill both his son Will and himself on the hunting trip. Nor as a youth could he comprehend the larger meaning of his father’s suicide, though the trauma of the event left Will, ever after, a “cold,” detached person who emotionally withdrew into the role of a cerebral “observer” of life. Now as an older man Will recalls the hunting trip in detail, especially how his father tried to convince him that they are both aristocratic loners alienated from the crass new society where, his father proclaims, “the ignorant armies clash by night.” His father insists to Will, “You’re one of us, I’m afraid. You already know too much.” 12 He asks Will to “trust” him as a “buddie,” trust that their death together is the only honorable response in a corrupt society. But his plan fails; father and son are only wounded in the staged hunting accident. As a grown man Will now realizes the fatalism of his father’s stoic code, how he was trapped in the “ancient hatreds and allegian­ ces, allegiances unto death and the love of war and rumors of war and underneath it death and your secret love of death, yes that was your secret.” 13 Although he escaped death in the Georgia woods, he has not escaped his father’s legacy and influence. Will sees that his entire life since the hunting trip, his successful career in the North and his comfortable life as a retired widower in North Carolina, has been a failed attempt to escape that legacy, escape his true self. He realizes that “nothing has happened to him since that day.” 14 The ghost of his father, “old mole” to the Hamlet-like Will, and his father’s death wish still marks him, so that he is forced to admit that “we’re together after all.” 15 Will’s new reflections on his relationship with his father lead him to see the fatalism that drove his father to suicide, a fatalism that still taints Will’s mind. His father was unable to even name the deadly malaise and despair that, in Percy’s view, pervades contemporary Western society. “The trouble is,” his father told Will, “there is no word for this. It’s not war and 12. Ibid., 55. 13. Ibid., 72. 14. Ibid., 52. 15. Ibid., 73–74.

The Second Coming: Finding Home 

227

it’s not peace. It’s not death and it’s not life. What is it? What do you call it?” When Will says he does not know, his father replies, “There is life and there is death. Life is better than death but there are worse things than death.” When Will asks, “What?,” his father has no clear answer. “There is no word for it. What is the word for a state which is not life and not death, a death-in-life?” 16 An appropriate word for this state is “Thanatos,” the title of Percy’s final novel. For Percy, as we have seen, naming is being, the unique human capacity to name and define a thing, a phenomenon, or a situation.17 Failure to name truth accurately is often rooted in a misunderstanding of man’s essential nature, his anthropological status as a being. As we know, for Percy and Dostoevsky, as well as Kierkegaard, man’s essential status is that of a creature dependent on God. For the two novelists, denial of this fundamental relationship to God was at the heart of the various ideologies afflicting their respective societies, since they promoted a deformed anthropology of man as an autonomous, self-willed creature. Prominent among them was the ideology of what Charles Taylor called “exclusive secular humanism.” 18 Will’s father was such a humanist, and through Will’s recollection of his father’s experience in World War II, Percy critiqued the limits of secular humanism and the way in which, deformed by the Nazis, it became complicit in the insane program to destroy all the Jews, political dissidents, and the physically and mentally handicapped in the “Final Solution.” Here, Will remembers how his father served in General Patton’s Tenth Armored Division, captured and treasured an S.S. colonel’s cap with its death’s-head insignia and his Luger, visited Weimar, but failed to mention the nearby Buchenwald death camp or the fact that Patton marched fifteen hundred of Weimar’s “best humanistic Germans” past the infamous camp. Will asks, “Is this not in fact, father, where your humanism ends in the end?” 19 Through Will, Percy points to the fatal flaw in the ideology of secular humanism: its inability to account for radical evil. Despite its noble 16. Ibid., 126. 17. Walker Percy, “Naming and Being,” in Signposts in a Strange Land, ed., introduction Patrick Samway (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 130–39. 18. Charles Taylor, “The Conflicts of Modernity,” in Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 495–523. 19. Percy, Second Coming, 132.

228 

Walker Percy

ideal to promote the universal lot and self-fulfillment of secular man, it remains susceptible to corruption into a tool used by despots with totalitarian goals, such as the Nazi regime. Anthropologist Rene Girard has written eloquently about the complex relationship between secular humanism, Christianity, and modern totalitarianism. Girard traces the development of modern humanism from its Christian roots, but also sees in it a “caricature of Christianity” once it separates itself from belief in Christian redemption through the cross.20 Percy implies a similar view in Will’s rhetorical question to his father. Reflecting on his father’s failure as a humanist, Will chides “people like you and Lewis Peckham,” his secular humanist golf friend, “and the professors and scientists (who) believe nothing.” Will now understands how his father’s stoicism-cum-humanism led him inevitably to suicide. In describing Will’s thoughts on his father’s suicide, Percy achieved a major breakthrough by explicitly linking a love of death to sexual perversion, violence, and suicide. The linkage is revealed by the combination of images in Will’s description of his father’s death. Both barrels. Wouldn’t one have been enough? Yes, given an ordinary need for death. But not if it’s a love of death. In the case of love, more is better than less, twice is good as one, and most is best of all. And if the aim is the ecstasy of love, two is closer to infinity than one, especially when the two are twelve-gauge number eight shot. And what samurai self-love of death, let alone the everyday fuck-you love, can match the double Winchester come of taking oneself into oneself, the cold steel Extension of oneself into mouth, yes, for you, for me, for us, the ultimate act of fuck-you love, fuck-off world, the penetration and union of perfect gun cold steel into warm, quailing flesh, the coming to end all coming, brain cells which together faltered and fell short, now flowered and fell apart, flung like stars around the whole, dark world.21

As Percy’s imagery reveals, and as Will’s description suggests, the desire for genuine love with another and of the world having failed, erotic desire is perverted into a solipsistic act of onanistic fellatio and deadly orgasm by shotgun, technology turned murderously against the self. Such is Percy’s 20. Rene Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2001), 161–89. 21. Percy, Second Coming, 148–49.

The Second Coming: Finding Home 

229

image of the apocalyptic, suicidal end of the embittered humanist trapped in “the wintery kingdom of the self.” As Ivan Karamazov observed, once God is denied and “all things are permitted,” the humanist’s love of humanity in general can easily turn to hatred and self-hatred. Having rejected his father’s stoicism/humanism, Will is perplexed when it comes to finding an alternative. He rejects the brand of New Age Christianity offered by his daughter Leslie and preacher Jack Curl. “People like the Christians and Californians believe anything, everything,” leaving Will to ask, “Is there another way?” Will believes his father’s suicide was “wasted” because it provided no answer about the meaning of life or how to live in the world, or how to die. Seeking “another way” or answer, Will thinks a clue might be found in the history and presence of believing Jews.22 His delusion that the Jews might be leaving North Carolina would be a clear sign of a gathering for the End, the impending Apocalypse that would confirm his own fatalism. At the same time, he hopes that the Jews may be a sign of God’s continuing presence in the world, a clue to the meaning of history, to the present age, to his life, and an answer other than stoicism, secular humanism, and the various forms of Gnostic Christianity practiced by contemporary religious groups. But his hope in the Jews as the “last sign” has seemingly also been emptied of meaning;23 they are not leaving North Carolina. His one personal link to an actual Jew, his youthful thrush Ethel Rosenblum, has faded into nostalgic memory, now symbolically replaced in the novel by his lewd neighbor Ewell McBee’s Jewish pornographic film model, Sarah Goodman, aka “Cheryl Lee.” 24

6 In creating Allison Huger, Percy expanded the theme of a “new woman” he had first explored in Anna in Lancelot and as Dostoevsky had developed in a different context in his fiction. Dostoevsky was ambivalent about the emergence of the new woman in mid-nineteenth-century Russia. He admired the courage, love, and strength of will of women like Sonya Marmaledov, Dunya Raskolnikov, Nastasya Filippovna, and Grushenka Svetlov and condemned their exploitation in a paternalistic society. But he opposed the radical fem22. Ibid., 132, 133. 23. Ibid., 191. 24. Ibid., 176.

230 

Walker Percy

inism, nihilism, and revolutionary ardor of some of his female contemporaries. Conservative that he was in these matters, his ideal for the role of women was rooted in the traditional family structure.25 Percy shared Dostoevsky’s social conservatism and the ideal of the traditional family unit. When he came to portray Allie, he cast the new woman in terms of her development of a new consciousness and a new life, which ends in marriage to Will. Like Will, Allie has suffered an “inner apocalypse” and collapse, retreating finally to the “cave” or psychological underground of her dark closet. Like Anna, her personal disaster renders her temporarily “mute,” silent, and uncommunicative. But as in both cases, her apocalypse becomes the beginning of new recognitions. A bright, talented young woman who for years dutifully conformed to her parents’ and others’ expectations, Allie comes to recognize that she always “made straight A’s and flunked life.” 26 Seeing that her life is a sham, she quit school, ended a loveless affair with a boy named Sarge, moved back home, and finally retreated in silence to her closet. Sent to Valleyhead Sanitarium for therapy, she undergoes electroshock treatments, which cause temporary amnesia, the opposite of Will’s post-collapse remembrance of “everything.” The shock treatments leave her, like Anna, “feeling like a rape victim in every way but one.” Percy’s linking of rape and electroshock is his sign of the dehumanization and sexual violence of the age, foreshadowing his warning about the contemporary misuse of technology and mind-altering drugs in The Thanatos Syndrome. Nevertheless, as in Anna’s case, the results of Allie’s collapse and electroshock “rape” are paradoxical. While they cause the “real done-in rapevictim feeling” of having undergone an assault on mind and body, they gradually bring “the feeling of the good, the survivor.” 27 Allie’s collapse opens the door to the possibility of a new life. The shock treatments destroyed the old patterns of conventional behavior—living to please others—couched in the deadening clichés and banalities of everyday society and opened her to a new freedom. Linguistically, she emerges from her ordeal almost as a “clean slate,” not entirely blank, but with a new aware25. Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2008), 175–79. 26. Percy, Second Coming, 91. 27. Ibid., 30.

The Second Coming: Finding Home 

231

ness focused on exploring the real meaning of words, the true relationship between words and deeds. She is a quirky embodiment of Percy-Peirce triadic consciousness, the lonely truth-seeker on a quest for personal freedom and an authentic life in the world, to be found, hopefully, in a loving relationship with another. Significantly, her new life focuses on naming things accurately, which for Percy is the quintessential human power with which to discover personal identity and individual freedom and to order her new, post-apocalyptic life. Moreover, as Allie’s new life develops, Percy will symbolically associate her with images of light and warmth that suggest an infusion of divine grace incarnated in the love between Allie and Will. Allie’s hope for a new life after her clever escape from the sanitarium is aided by the fortune in land she has inherited from her Aunt Sally—a valuable coastal island and a large tract of land in the North Carolina mountains, upon which stands an old greenhouse that will become her new home. But there are threats to her planned new life. Her devious mother, Kitty, plots to return her to the sanitarium under the cares of the foppish Dr. Duk, meanwhile scheming to wrest legal control of her inheritance. Perhaps more important, once she has escaped she faces the problem of isolation in her glasshouse retreat, of loneliness and relapse, symptoms she still suffers. Allie longs for companionship, a need to find an answering genuine love to fulfill her deepest self. She needs an “other” with whom to join in a solitude à deux and become one of Guardini’s “survivors” with “courage of the heart” after the end of the modern age.

6 Having apparently rejected his father’s suicidal despair, Will is driven in his search for truth to devise an ingenious plan to challenge God to give him a sign. He will entice God to reveal himself or not by plotting his own potential suicide and force God to provide a clear answer to the question of belief in him. Percy stages Will’s challenge against the backdrop of Pascal’s famous wager on God’s existence, which both protagonist Will and author Percy reject as “frivolous” because there is nothing really at stake in the bet. God’s existence may or may not be confirmed for the wager at the end of life, but it makes no difference to the wager now.28 In contrast, Will plans 28. See Percy’s comments on Pascal in Lawson and Kramer, eds., More Conversations with Walker Percy (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993), 75.

232 

Walker Percy

to stake his life on his descent and potential death in Lost Cove Cave. His plan is the rationalist’s challenge to God, like Ivan Karamazov’s challenge to God to justify human suffering or Lance Lamar’s search for the meaning of sin by blaming God for human evil. Will’s gesture is hubristic and apocalyptic, an attempt to solve divine mystery. Will’s descent into the cave, of course, echoes the Notes from Underground and Percy’s use of this motif in the other novels I have discussed. It keynotes a psychological pattern, like Allie’s descent into her subconscious in her closet, out of which both she and Will emerge to begin a new life. But in Will’s actual descent into the cave, Percy complicated the motif by linking Will’s challenge to God to his fatal attraction to suicide. The narrator, however, makes clear that Will has “gone mad”; he has “descended into Lost Cove Cave looking for proof of the existence of God and a sign of the apocalypse like some crackpot preacher in California.” 29 In his madness, Will has become almost totally possessed of an apocalyptic consciousness. He gloats over his ingenious, Gnostic plan, just as Kirilov took pride in his suicidal plan to triumph over belief in God. Will thinks “my suicide will represent progress in the history of suicide,” a triumph over “you all, God, Jews, Christians, unbelievers, Romans, Jutes, Angles, Saxons, Yankees, Rebs, blacks, tigers. There is no way I cannot find out.” His challenge will be the “ultimate scientific experiment,” the rationalist’s strategy to prove God’s existence or not and thereby solve the mystery of any individual’s life.30 Will argues casuistically that if his death occurs, it “will not be suicide,” because he wants to live. Consequently, his death, if it comes, will be God’s doing; God will be guilty of murder. Nevertheless, it must be said that although Will’s plan is a “mad” rationalization, it does reveal a genuine desire for some answer to the meaning of his life, unlike Kirilov’s and Lance Lamar’s condemnations of God. But things go awry when Will’s grandiose plan is interrupted by an ordinary toothache.31 We recall that Dostoevsky’s underground man extolled the perverse “enjoyment” suffered by a hyper-self-conscious man with a toothache, whose moans “express all the aimlessness of pain which con29. Percy, Second Coming, 197–98. 30. Ibid., 211. 31. Ibid., 213.

The Second Coming: Finding Home 

233

sciousness finds so humiliating” and the “whole system of natural law” that causes the pain. To the underground man, the sufferer “is only indulging himself out of spite and malice, and it’s precisely in this awareness and pain that the voluptuousness resides.” 32 What makes the underground man’s view so important, and Dostoevsky’s ironic description so mordantly funny, is Dostoevsky’s lampooning of the Cartesian split suffered by the self-conscious man, “a man effected by progress and European civilization,” being forced to endure a toothache. He is powerless against the “laws of nature” that produce pain. Despite his acute self-awareness he is a slave to ordinary bodily frailty, as was Binx on the train, young Will and Kitty in the park, and the older Will now in the cave. Will suffers from a similar mind-body split, but the effects of his toothache deep in the cave are different from those that the narrator of the Notes describes. Rather than experiencing “voluptuousness,” Will’s pain and nausea drive him to frantically struggle to escape the cave, a desperate affirmation of the will to live that ends his so-called suicidal experiment. Will’s struggle to escape the cave combines his physical ordeal with a humbling psychological and spiritual struggle that shatters his rationalist consciousness and fatalistic thought patterns, opening the way to a new consciousness and a humbler sense of self. Percy conveys this shattering metanoia through a series of disjointed recollections—personal memories, fantasies, apocalyptic thoughts and dreams—that flood his mind. He recalls a conversation with the black servant D’lo after the hunting accident, thoughts of the Civil War and World War II, of Ethen Rosenblum, of a trip to Los Angeles with his father and the suicide of actor Ross Alexander, of the legendary tiger said to have descended into the cave to die 2,000 years ago, of his daughter Leslie’s verbal attack on him, and other fragmented memories and images from his past. The upshot of his hallucinatory descent into the underground of his past is his discovery that a clear answer to his challenge to God has not been given. As the narrator says, “Unfortunately things can go wrong with an experiment carefully designed by a sane scientist. A clear yes or no answer may not be forthcoming, after all. The answer may be a muddled maybe.” As for the fortuitous toothache, “whether it 32. Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans., ed. Michael R. Katz (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 12–13.

234 

Walker Percy

was God’s doing or ordinary mortal frailty, one cannot be sure.” Will manages to escape the cave, exhausted and injured, and escape his hallucination of the “great black beast of the apocalypse bearing down on him, eyes red, jaws opening and ravening, when, wood splintering first and then exploding into kindling, he hit the table, then concrete, but not too hard, with one shoulder mostly, but with the back of his head some.” 33 As Gary Ciuba has astutely argued, Will’s descent into the underground was driven by the hubristic pride of a rationalist who would command God to follow his will and reveal himself. In his delusion Will would “engineer” the Apocalypse and Parousia on his own terms. But his arrogant challenge is comically undercut by the raging toothache, “a hot icepick driven up into his brain,” and nausea, the ordinary human frailties that bring the rationalist back to earthly reality. In Will’s humbling, Percy mocks all the literalist believers in John’s Revelation and the mystery of eschatology. As Ciuba affirms, the Parousia or “second coming” is “here and now,” made eternally present in the world by Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom of God in the gospels.34 Will’s fortunate fall is into Allie’s greenhouse, which seems to him like a “church.” His toothache gone, his challenge to God defeated, and chastened by his ordeal, Will is now opened to discover and begin a new life.

6 In dramatizing Will and Allie’s recovery from collapse and their mutual discovery of a truer, loving self, Percy synthesized and resolved the major themes in the novel (and from his earlier novels) within a Christian perspective woven through symbolic patterns of action and language. Some readers have found this resolution too optimistic and serendipitous.35 But Percy’s strategy is fully consistent with the vision of hope incarnated in the Christocentric, comic vision that shapes the novel. Percy sometimes alluded to Yeats’s “The Second Coming” when speaking of his novel, particularly 33. Percy, Second Coming, 213, 226. 34. See Gary Ciuba’s excellent discussion of Will’s descent into the cave and its aftermath in Ciuba, Walker Percy: Books of Revelation (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), 210–29. 35. See, for example, Doreen Fowler’s “Answers and Ambiguity in Percy’s The Second Coming,” in Walker Percy, ed., introduction Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), 115–25; and Kieran Quinlan’s Walker Percy: The Last Catholic Novelist (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 152–74.

The Second Coming: Finding Home 

235

the poet’s theme that “the center did not hold,” an allusion to the collapse of Christendom in the West and the apocalypse of twentieth-century barbarism, war, social, political, and moral chaos, and the potential suicide of civilization. The novel certainly suggests something of this impending chaos in the host of “dead souls,” lotus-eaters, and “non-suicides” who populate Will and Allie’s world—Kitty and Walter Huger, Dr. Duk, Lewis Peckham, Jimmy Rogers, Jack Curl, Will’s daughter Leslie, and his pornographic neighbor Earl McBee. As a group they can be seen as descendants of the cast of fools Dostoevsky satirized in Demons. But Percy counterbalanced the pessimism of Yeats’s poem with Jesus’ revelation of his Kingdom “here and now,” Christ’s anticipated second coming at the end of time, and the creation of “a new heaven and a new earth” (Rv 21). In this movement, Percy included both apocalyptic and eschatological perspectives, as we shall see. He also qualified the serendipitous ending of the novel by including both protagonists’ psychological and physical frailties—Will’s “temporal lobe syndrome” and proneness to falling and Allie’s susceptibility to depression. In their recovery, Will and Allie discover a new consciousness through mutual love and charity toward others. Parallels to Dostoevsky are illuminating in this regard. As we saw, Dostoevsky developed two opposing versions of the new consciousness theme. One was the type of autonomous consciousness represented by rationalists and nihilists like Ippolit, Kirilov, Pyotr Verkhovensky, and Stavrogin. The other was the type of Christian “new” consciousness seen in the monk Zosima and Bishop Tikhon, a concept rooted in St. Paul’s vision of the “new man” in Christ. As we also saw, writing in the twentieth century Percy added a third element by emphasizing the distortion of modern consciousness caused by the layman’s absorption of the categories of scientism, a perverse offshoot of the “autonomous man” ideology. Father Zosima spoke eloquently about this predicament and the hope of redemption from it. Paradise is hidden from each of us; it is concealed within me, too, right now, and if I wish, it will come to me in reality, tomorrow even, and for the rest of my life . . . each man (is) guilty before all and for all. And indeed it is true that when people understand this thought, the Kingdom of heaven will come to them, no longer in a dream but in reality. In order to make the world over anew, people themselves must turn onto a different path psy-

236 

Walker Percy

chically. Until one has indeed become the brother of all, there will be no brotherhood.36

Zosima’s vision is tempered by a clear-eyed assessment of his society, one increasingly driven by egoism, greed, autonomous will power, and isolation. “For everyone who strives most of all to separate his own person, wishing to experience the fullness of life within himself and yet what comes of his efforts is not the fullness of life but full suicide, for instead of the fullness of self-definition, they fall into complete isolation (and) suicidal impotence.” 37 For Zosima, there is “only one salvation” from this predicament: to “make yourself responsible for all the sins of men,” recognize “the secret bond” that exists between all men, embrace “the idea of serving mankind,” and become “the servant of all.” 38 As we saw, essentially the same message was delivered by Porfiry to Raskolnikov and Bishop Tikhon to Stavrogin. Percy suggests that Will received a similar message during his ordeal in the cave. When Allie asks him if he received a message in the cave, Will answers, “Yes.” When she asks what it was, he claims not to know, except “at least I know what I have to do.” 39 What he realizes he must do is to give up his apocalyptic obsessions and frivolous life and commit himself in love and humility to the service of others as best he can. Percy suggested that the “message” delivered to him is the mystery of grace received, which has already begun to transform him. What begins to emerge in Will’s transformation is what theologian James Alison has called an “eschatological” consciousness, one that counterbalances his inherited “apocalyptic” fatalism.40 Percy shows that Will’s emerging new consciousness is centered in the Christian post- resurrection vision of a new reality in history. Alison argues that the apocalyptic imagination or consciousness, so often expressed in the Bible, creates a dualism between imminent reality on the one hand and, on the other, the hopedfor supernatural “eternal life” beyond history and time. Such a dualism 36. Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 303 (my emphasis). 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., 316–17. 39. Percy, Second Coming, 246. 40. I am greatly indebted to James Alison’s The Joy of Being Wrong, foreword by Sebastian Moore (New York: Crossroad, 1998), 212–21.

The Second Coming: Finding Home 

237

runs counter to Christ’s claim that with his coming the “kingdom of God” is “among you,” here and now. Because the apocalyptic view emphasizes the “passing away” of this world in favor of emphasis on the “next” world, Alison says it encourages a form of idealism that represents an escape from historical responsibility and should be shunned out of faithfulness to the gospel’s demand of taking seriously the “bringing about of the Kingdom in the here and now.” 41 He further contends that Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection mark the beginning of the subversion of the apocalyptic vision and the emergence of an eschatological vision committed to the imminent world. “This process of eschatology in the key Christological moment of the death and resurrection culminates in what is referred to as the ‘realized eschatology’ to be found in John’s gospel, where again it is the exaltation of the son of man (Jn 3:14–15) on the cross that to eschaton irrupts in human history.” Alison concludes that “this ‘realized eschatology’ turned the hope that related so urgently to the end in earlier epistles into the ‘patience’ that come to the fore in the later texts of the canon.” 42 Percy’s development of Will’s new life with Allie is revealed through a pattern of Christian symbolic actions and images that dramatize his turn from an apocalyptic to an eschatological consciousness. Will overcomes suicidal despair through his love for Allie and his commitment to others, here and now. However, this does not mean that the apocalyptic sense is erased in him (or in Percy). Rather, it continues to exist in creative tension with his eschatological sense, particularly seen in Will (and Percy’s) awareness of the immanent potential for disaster—literal and spiritual—in contemporary society. As many critics have noted, Percy employed sacramental imagery to convey Will’s symbolic resurrection and rebirth into the ordinary world.43 He falls into Allie’s greenhouse, whose “stained glass windows” make him think, “I’m in church.” Filthy from his ordeal in the cave, Will is washed clean by Allie, who feeds him oatmeal like a child. Allie’s washing of Will’s naked body evokes images of the women who washed Christ’s dead body and of the Pieta. His naked body “reminded her of some painting of the 41. Ibid., 213. 42. Ibid., 215. 43. See, for example, Allen Prigden’s Walker Percy’s Sacramental Landscapes (Selingrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 2000), 97–144, and Gary Ciuba’s discussion of The Second Coming, in Walker Percy: Books of Revelation, 202–47.

238 

Walker Percy

body of Christ taken down from the crucifix, the white flesh gone blue with death.” 44 The image of the deposition recalls Dostoevsky’s use of Holbein’s painting of the dead Christ in The Idiot, which destroyed Rogozhkin and Ippolit’s faith. In contrast, Percy’s image evokes Jesus being ministered to by loving women, as Will is by Allie. As Christ is resurrected, through Allie’s loving care Will is reborn into the beginning of a new life. But his transformation into a “new man” will not be accomplished without struggle. In addition to his physical injuries, there is the threat of his daughter Leslie’s plan to maneuver him permanently into the convalescent home and Kitty Huger’s scheme to seduce him and help her take control of her daughter Allie’s fortune. But the greatest threat to his new life is the continuing presence of his father’s voice in Will’s head, the ghost who continues to tempt him to suicide. The pull of his father’s legacy is still strong in Will’s psyche. Throughout much of his recovery, he will engage in a mental debate with his father, whose influence is truly demonic, pushing Will to kill himself with the Luger he inherited from his father.

6 Allie’s struggle to develop a new consciousness and new self is no less difficult than Will’s. Having survived the collapse of her former self and the electroshock treatments, she emerges from the sanitarium ready to start a new life in the world. The key to Percy’s strategy in presenting Allie’s recovery is his emphasis on the need for authentic language, honest words that express the truth of one’s being and overcome the deadening banalities and lies that corrupt everyday speech in postmodern society. Percy’s specific emphasis, in both his philosophical essays and novels, on semiotic relations—the intrinsic link between word and truth, thought and meaning— set him apart from Dostoevsky, though both writers possessed a genius for satirizing the decadent language or their respective societies. Both saw this decadence as a telling sign of the increasing abstraction and “objectification” of reality and further dehumanization of the individual. We recall, for example, the underground man’s attack on the rationalists’ ideological jargon and Dostoevsky’s brilliant satire on the language of lawyers and social scientists in the trial scene in The Brothers Karamazov. In Allie’s case, 44. Percy, Second Coming, 236.

 

The Second Coming: Finding Home 

239

her strange, schizophrenic-like conversations with Will signify her quest for an authentic voice to reflect the inner truth of her being and a way to find an honest connection to others in the world. For Percy, Guardini’s interpersonal, loving communication between “one lonely person” and another is the key to healing the alienation caused by the distorted, objectifying language absorbing the modern mind. Honest language can heal the fissure between mind and the world’s body, between self and other. Ideally, complete healing would create an emotional, spiritual, and physical union between lovers, an ideal that Percy set out to portray in part 2 of the novel. Allie establishes a new home, a place to be, in her resurrected greenhouse, helped by Will’s loan of a “creeper” to hoist and rekindle the huge, half-buried stove, the hearth and heart of her new home. Quirky but honest talk begins between the two loners as Allie nurses and nurtures the battered Will. But living alone, Allie “had already begun to slip,” beset by an “unfulfilled longing” that threatens to pull her “down into her dog-star Sirius self again.” Unsure of what to do with her time, she learns that while “the trick lay in leading the most ordinary life imaginable,” in not trying to be extraordinary, “late afternoon needs another person.” She wonders if an affair would appease her longing, if “doing it” sexually is “the secret of life.” She had “done it” with boyfriend Sarge, but mechanically and without love. Reading what the greater writers had to say about “love,” she asks herself, “What does all this mean? These people are crazier than I am.” The word “love” itself seems to have been emptied of meaning in the culture. Allie cannot find the connection between “being in love” and “doing it.” 45 The connection comes when Allie begins to fall in love with Will after rescuing him when he wanders off and falls again. She revives him with her warm body, and as they come to love-making, they talk. Words are made flesh, cognate to the divine Word made flesh and signified by the “diamond shape” of their bodies. As their bodies unite, both reveal their deepest thoughts. Will discloses what he “learned in the cave” and what “he is going to do” in the future—turn away from diversions and instead “stick himself into the world” by helping others. In the cave, he discovered both the will to love and his deep need to give and receive love. Listening to him 45. Ibid., 236–38, 239.

240 

Walker Percy

now, Allie senses in his honest words an “answer” to her own need for love, clothed in words. “Though he hardly touched her, his words seemed to flow across all parts of her body. Were they meant to? A pleasure she had never known before bloomed deep in her body. Was this a way of making love?” 46 Embracing Will, and remembering her religious Aunt Val’s healing touch and words (she “told me I’m going to be fine”), Allie says, “Now I understand how the two work.” “What two?” “The it and the doing, the noun and the verb, sweet sweet love and a putting it to you, loving and hating, you and I.” He laughed. “You do, don’t you. What happens to the two?” “They become one but not in the sappy way of saying.” “What way, then?” “One plus one equals one and oh boy almond joy.”

As I have argued elsewhere, Allie’s words describing their union are sappy—human language is always inadequate to express the mystery of love—but they are also true, signifying her discovery of the deep, true meaning of the relation between the “it” and the “doing,” a saving, reciprocal act of love with another.47 As Will and Allie enjoy their physical/spiritual union, “lightning strikes again. The glass house glittered like a diamond.” 48 But their solitude à deux is not exclusive. Allie now plans to help her friend Kelso escape the sanitarium, and Will plans to build houses with the help of able-bodied retirees now warehoused in the convalescent home. Eros is transformed into caritas; isolated selves become selfless in the world to help others, as the monk Zosima told Alyosha Karamazov to do with his life. Will and Allie’s loving sexual union represents an ideal for Percy, but it is qualified and grounded in the solid, everyday world. The clues to this grounding are significant. Unlike the romantic “sappiness” of Lance Lamar’s rhapsodic fantasy about absolute sexual “ecstasy” with his wife, Margot, Allie recognizes the ambiguity in sexual relations, the “loving 46. Ibid., 262. 47. See my discussion of this section of the novel in John F. Desmond, Walker Percy’s Search for Community (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 194–205. 48. Percy, Second Coming, 265.

The Second Coming: Finding Home 

241

and hating,” so that even in the best of love-making, there is an element of self-assertion and self-gratification. In the human state, Allie sees, desire is always an ambiguous power. There is the sad-happy awareness that the other is always an Other and that a blissful sexual union is a transitory experience that must be transformed into enduring love. And as Binx Bolling learned, “flesh poor flesh” can always “quail and flail.” Here, Allie accepts that truth with love and joy as she commits herself to a man old enough to be her father. Unlike Lance Lamar, neither Allie nor Will try to apotheosize their erotic relation into an absolute ecstasy. And unlike Lance’s Gnostic dream of creating a New Order of society ruled by “honorable” Stoic men who dominate compliant women, Will and Allie turn instead to the fractured world around them, following the lead of Binx in The Moviegoer, Father John in Lancelot, and Alyosha Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov, by committing themselves to helping their fellow citizens.

6 Percy focused the last section of the novel on Will’s struggle to overcome the fatalism of his “apocalyptic consciousness,” signified by the presence of his father’s voice in his mind. To overcome his inherited attraction to suicide, Will must not only reject his father’s call to suicide, but also name the spiritual sickness that has infected both him and the age at large. For Percy, as we have seen, naming truth is the key to self-knowledge and life. In reviewing the events of his life, Will’s sees that his father’s attempt to make them “pals” in death was both a personal betrayal and a call to join all the “death-dealers in the twentieth century.” 49 He sees the link between his father’s code and that of the Nazi warriors and all the lovers of war his father idolized. Now, Will comes to name the enemy. “The name of the enemy is death. Not the death of dying but the living death. The name of this century is the Century of the Love of Death.” Will discovers that the age is in the grip of Satan and is possessed by a will to death; it is an age of suicide. He names the author of this love of death: “Old father of lies, that’s what you are, the devil himself, for only the devil could have thought up all the deceits and guises under which death masquerades. But I know all your names.” Will (and Percy) proceeds to name 49. Ibid., 269–70.

242 

Walker Percy

all the deceits and guises under which death masquerades, all the “-isms” and “-asms” and bankrupt forms of modern ideologies that hide or undermine his quest for truth. Will rejects these ideologies, instead choosing “a third way, life”—that is, the life of a religious searcher determined to continue his quest for truth.50 As he begins to nod off, he has an apocalyptic “presentiment” of “what is going to happen” to the century of the love of death; he sees a vision of a desolate, deserted mall, populated only by a single raccoon. But amid the vacancy he hears a voice accompanied by a “flash of light” as “someone spoke.” Then, like an Old Testament prophet, he receives a sign, an ambiguous “answer” to what he sought in the cave. “Very well, then, you’ve insisted on it, here it is, the green-stick Rosebud gold-bug matador, the great distinguished thing.” 51 Is it a sign of a quintessential personal revelation or a sign of hopelessness in the age of suicide? Will’s unwavering desire for truth is a sign of his growing eschatological consciousness and of his rejection of his former life as an alienated autonomous man. But even after he names and rejects his own and the century’s impulse toward suicide, Will faces further challenges. Alone without Allie and physically weak, he starts a bus trip back to Georgia, scene of the hunting trip with his father, where he now plans to end his own life. But what saves him from suicide is his memory of Allie, signified by the sight of “a single gold poplar which caught the sun like a yellow-haired girl coming out of dark forest.” At once, “his heart was flooded with sweetness but a sweetness of a different sort, sharp, sweet urgency, a need to act, to run and catch.” 52 Afraid of losing Allie, he aborts the bus trip and returns home. Other challenges remain, represented by the manipulative “demons” surrounding Will and tempting him to abandon his search for truth and his love for Allie.53 As I noted, Kitty Huger tries to lure him with sex and schemes to have Allie recommitted to the sanitarium and gain legal control of her property. His daughter Leslie plots with preacher Jack Curl to use money from Will’s Peabody Trust to establish their “love and faith” community. Leslie also seeks to permanently institutionalize her father in 50. Ibid., 271, 272. 51. Ibid., 227. 52. Ibid., 297. 53. Apropos this motif, we recall that Dostoevsky meant his title Demons to refer to all the “possessed” characters in the novel and not just the nihilist revolutionaries.

The Second Coming: Finding Home 

243

St. Mark’s convalescent center. Will’s golfing buddies entice him to join the seniors’ golf tour. Compounding all these temptations are Will’s infirmities of mind and body, diagnosed by physicians as “Haussman’s syndrome” or “inappropriate longing,” caused by a pH imbalance.54 Percy dramatizes Will’s final triumph over these temptations to despair as the triumph of a “new man” with a growing eschatological consciousness. Will escapes the convalescent home, reunites with Allie, and together they begin a new life, ready to marry.55 When they join again in sexual union, Will happily discovers that “entering her was like turning a corner and coming home.” 56 Supported by his love and care of Allie, Will finally rejects his father’s call to suicide. He drives to the gorge and flings the inherited Greener shotgun and the Luger away.57 As a further sign of his new life with Allie, he determines to live as a “man of action,” for Allie and for others. In Will’s new life Percy’s hero embraces the scriptural ideal of a Christian man of action who will work to bring about the “new kingdom, here and now,” by committing himself to the ordinary needs of the community, while “waiting and watching” for the Parousia. Apocalyptic thought patterns are displaced, though not entirely, by an eschatological viewpoint that demands commitment to the present world while living in faith and hope.58 Will plans to help Allie manage her inheritance, organize a construction project with retirees Ryan, Arnold, and Eberhart, and restart his law career. His earlier fatalism and apocalyptic modes of thought have been unmasked as “snares and delusions.” Challenges remain, but with Allie’s love and his new vision, Will and Allie can face the future in hope and joy as Guardini’s two lonely, loving searchers.

6 Percy dramatized the importance of the Christian eschatological vision at the end of the novel through Will’s relationship with the strange retired Episcopal priest Father Weatherbee. The vision derives from Christ’s resurrection and from the post-resurrection witness of the apostles, especially St. John and St. Paul. Will thinks that the authoritative witness to that vi54. Percy, Second Coming, 302. 55. Ibid., 328–31. 56. Ibid., 339. 57. Ibid., 338. 58. Alison, Joy of Being Wrong, 216–20.

244 

Walker Percy

sion has been transmitted to the present in the doctrine of apostolic succession, which he believes is now embodied in the antic Father Weatherbee. “My own hunch is that the Apostolic Succession involved the laying on of hands, right?,” he tells the priest. “This goes back to Christ himself, a Jew, a unique historical phenomenon, as unique as the Jews.” For Will, the Jews “may or not be a sign,” but they are “the common denominator between us. That is to say, I am not a believer but I believe I am on the track of something.” 59 Will’s obsession with the Jews leaving North Carolina was a delusion, but it proves not entirely a fit of madness, since he has heard St. Paul’s message that salvation comes from the Jew. He senses that the mysterious Father Weatherbee “may know something I don’t know.” That is, he sees the priest as a possible apostle with authority, a news-bearer, and thus a link to faith and to the source of truth and salvation in Christ. The theme of apostolic authority and witness was a persistent one throughout Percy’s essays and fiction. As we saw, in his earlier seminal essay, “The Message in the Bottle,” he examined the predicament of the castaway on an island, who needs not only knowledge of his immediate situation to survive and thrive, but also “news” from beyond the island. That is, he needs faith in “a piece of news” from a “news-bearer,” an apostle or witness to the “good news” of salvation who “has the authority to deliver the message.” Percy adds that “the apostolic character in Christianity is unique among religions.” 60 As we have seen, various characters in Percy’s novels serve as news-bearers with authority: the unnamed nun who converts Sr. Johnette Vianney; Fr. Rinaldo Smith in both Love in the Ruins and The Thanatos Syndrome; Father John, incipiently, in Lancelot; and Father Weatherbee. As I have also suggested, there are versions of these “apostolic” characters in Dostoevsky’s fiction: Sonya Marmeladov, Porfiry, the monk Zosima, and Bishop Tikhon. Given his belief in Father Weatherbee as a possible apostolic messenger, Will decides to accept instruction from the old priest, not necessarily to accept all the dogmas, but to accept him as a possible source of authoritative

59. Percy, Second Coming, 357–58. 60. Walker Percy, “The Message in the Bottle,” in The Message in the Bottle (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), 246–48.

The Second Coming: Finding Home 

245

truth.61 Significantly, he appeals to Father Weatherbee “as a penitent,” like the humbled Raskolnikov in prison, Shatov before his death, and Dmitri Karamazov before his trial. These penitent figures contrast with the unrepentant Ivan, the suicide Stavrogin, and the defiant Lance Lamar. Will asks the priest to perform his wedding to Allie and sees in the old priest a confirmation of his “new life” with her, his commitment to work to change the present world and to continue to search for truth. Percy ends the novel with the triumph of the eschatological over the apocalyptic, at least for Will and Allie. As James Alison argues, Jesus’ teachings subvert the “three dualities characteristic of apocalyptic thought: (heaven vs. earth), the temporal (this age vs. the age to come), and the social (sons of light, elect righteous vs. sons of dark, ‘the world,’ unrighteous).” Christ “the crucified and forgiving victim” becomes himself the presence of the Kingdom “here and now.” 62 As for any possible universal catastrophe, Alison argues that “any final ‘apocalypse’ will be purely of human making, the outworking of the dynamism of death-related rivalistic desire.” Like the transforming experience of the cave, Will sees both Allie and Father Weatherbee as gifts given to him. With a “secret joy,” he acclaims, “What is it I want from her and him, he wondered, not only want but must have? Is she a gift and therefore a sign of a giver? Could it be that the Lord is here, masquerading behind the simply silly holy face? Am I crazy to want both, her and Him? No, not want, must have, and will have.” 63

6 The Second Coming was Percy’s clearest expression of his Christian belief and of the practical working out of the Christian ethic in the postmodern world—an answer to Lance Lamar’s question: What do survivors do? It represented a modest triumph of faith and love over despair and suicide, both literal and spiritual suicide, and of living with charity and hope despite human frailties and moral weaknesses. In the love of Will and Allie, Percy also dramatized the triumph of love over the age’s sexual malaise by a physical, emotional, and spiritual union interwoven with honest words of self-giving love that mutually affirm the selfhood and integrity of the other 61. Percy, Second Coming, 358. 62. Ibid., 216, 217. 63. Ibid., 359.

246 

Walker Percy

person. Will and Allie’s words of love and comfort link them to the healing words of Christ, symbolized by Allie’s figuration as a caring mother and lover, by her constant association with images of light, and by her Christlike touch when she “wet her thumbs with her tongue and smoothed his eyebrows.” 64 As we saw, Percy refashioned the theme of apocalypse, which is always open to fatalistic or escapist interpretation, in the light of a Christian eschatological vision that affirms the “Kingdom of God” here and now, confirmed in specific acts of charity, love, and faith. The novel ends with Will and Allie’s open-ended commitment to the immediate needs of the community. This hopeful, Christ-centered vision, of course, was also shared by Dostoevsky. Despite their shared pessimism about their respective ages, both Dostoevsky and Percy saw the Christian ethic—the life of the “Christ-bearer” and loving witness to hope—as the only true answer to the nihilism, violence, atheistic humanism, and general despair of the times— the spiritual despair that threatens to destroy modern civilization. 64. Ibid., 395.

The Second Coming: Finding Home 

247

Chap ter 12 Love in the Ruins and The Thanatos Syndrome Cautionary Tales

Sixteen years elapsed between the publication of Love in the Ruins (1971) and The Thanatos Syndrome (1987), an intervening period that witnessed vast social, political, and cultural changes in America. Both novels are satirical cautionary tales with notable similarities and differences. The similarities between them are readily observed. Dr. Tom is the protagonist in both works, and other important characters reappear in the sequel: Tom’s wife, Ellen (née Oglethorpe), the prophetic news-bearer Fr. Rinaldo Smith, More’s physician friend Dr. Max Gottlieb, and tavern owner Leroy Ledbetter. Many important events in both novels center on the activities of physicians at Fedville, the government-funded, technocratic center dedicated to the improvement of citizens’ lives through the application of rational scientific principles (scientism) and drugs to advance the utopian goals of secular humanism and behaviorism. The malign forces of Satan, the “principalities and powers,” are at work in both novels, dedicated to the destruction of individual souls and to sowing general social chaos. Several Percyean themes are repeated and developed further: the “loss of self,” the corruption of language, love versus eros, freedom versus slavery, religious faith versus agnosticism/atheism, despair versus hope, and sexual dysfunction, suicide, and other lesser themes.

248

The major differences between the two novels are more striking and important to consider. Love in the Ruins is a futuristic, comic, post-apocalyptic satire set in a time “near the end of the world” when the social order in America has collapsed into warring factions, revolutionary violence, and general chaos. Its tone is high-spirited and humorous, despite its underlying cautionary message. The Thanatos Syndrome, set in “present day” Louisiana, is a much more somber novel, its biting satire more direct, perhaps reflecting Percy’s darkening mood about American society. What humor exists in the novel is played in a minor key, barely enough to lighten the grim twentieth-century realities Percy focused on in the novel: two world wars; the Holocaust; the widespread dehumanization of citizens under technology and advanced pharmacology, fostered by Fedville, the Federal government and the Supreme Court; the proliferation of mind-altering drugs; bestial sexual behavior; pedophilia and euthanasia. The Catholic Church and the sacraments have been relegated to the periphery of the novel, unlike their significant presence in Love in the Ruins. However, the principal spokesman for the church’s religious/moral vision, the prophet figure Fr. Rinaldo Smith, plays a central role in the novel, sometimes overshadowing Tom More as protagonist by the sheer force of his personality. But even though his role in The Thanatos Syndrome is greatly expanded, the priest’s impact on the larger social order, as represented by the activities of Fedville physicians, is marginal at best. Perhaps the most important difference between the two novels is the change in the character of Tom More. In Love in the Ruins, More is a “bad Catholic” partly crippled by his hubristic drive for scientific fame and by his wayward sexual appetites. But throughout his trials he remains committed to his namesake, St. Thomas More, and the Catholic faith, and by the end of the novel he accepts life as a humbled penitent, receiving the sacraments of reconciliation and the Eucharist. In the sequel More has abandoned his Catholic belief and lives as a weak but ethically minded psychiatrist, an ex-convict after being imprisoned for illegally dispensing drugs to truck drivers. More’s distance—and that of the novel—from a religious-centered axis of meaning is shown in More’s obtuseness in trying to grasp the meaning of Fr. Smith’s warnings about the nation’s drift toward spiritual suicide. Regarding the broader Western culture, Percy’s somber message suggests

Love in the Ruins / The Thanatos Syndrome 

249

that any once-held consensus of moral principles regarding the integrity of the spiritual self and individual freedom has been swamped by the “principalities and powers” presently ruling civilization. The novel seems to confirm Percy’s fear that the deformation of consciousness by scientism, further exacerbated by drugs, has infected almost all levels of society. My first purpose in this chapter is to discuss major themes, motifs, and character development in both Percy novels and analyze the important similarities and differences between them. Second, I plan to link the two novels to key themes and patterns in the major Dostoevsky works I have discussed throughout this study. As we shall again see, Percy adapted and advanced elements of the Russian novelist’s vision as they proved prophetically relevant to the twentieth century.

Love in the Ruins

Near the beginning of Love in the Ruins Tom More describes the apocalyptic collapse of American society and the failure of the rational secular ideal of the Founding Fathers, the “self-evident” claim that “all men are created equal,” a principle violated by the brutal fact of slavery, the nation’s “original sin.” As More says, “The center did not hold”; society has descended into a chaos of warring social, political, moral, and religious factions.1 Percy saw the collapse of the modern world as it was based on what he termed the “consensus anthropology,” defined as the Western democratic-technologicalhumanist view of man as a higher organism invested in certain traditional trappings of a more or less nominal Judeo-Christianity.2 The root cause of this collapse is Satan; More observes that “principalities and powers are everywhere victorious. Wickedness flourishes in high places.” 3 Later, More extends the diagnosis to Western civilization as a whole when, beginning with World War I, “the hemorrhage and death by suicide of the old Western world” erupted.4 Evil has triumphed over the secular humanists’ rational ideal represented by the Founding Fathers and the European Enlighten1. Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), 18, 58. 2. Percy, “Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Liebowitz,” in Rediscoveries, ed. David Madden, (New York: Crown, 1971), 264. 3. Percy, Love in the Ruins, 5. 4. Ibid., 47.

250 

Walker Percy

ment thinkers who provided the intellectual framework for the American experiment. Had he lived into the twentieth century, Dostoevsky would certainly have agreed with More’s diagnosis. Parallels between More’s vision and Dostoevsky’s critique of Western Enlightenment values, as we have seen, become immediately clear. More’s opening description of the social, political, and moral fragmentation in Paradise Estates and its environs echo Raskolnikov’s nightmare vision of a “terrible plague” of germs—evil “spirits endowed with reason and will”— that sweeps Europe and drives those infected “mad and violent.” 5 Victims come to believe that their autonomous opinions and “scientific conclusions” are incontestably right. Citizens no longer understand each other; they cannot agree on what “was good and what was evil.” Since each believes his own opinion to be absolute truth, moral consensus collapses. Their exercise of reason and will alone, without reference to God or a transcendent order of reality, soon leads to war and the complete disintegration of society. Dostoevsky’s warning about the fate of a godless society based on reason and science alone is repeated by the elder Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov when he argues that “no science or self-interest will ever enable people to share their property and their rights among themselves.” Instead, belief in radical individual autonomy and self-will would produce “not the fullness of life but full suicide.” 6 Percy’s diagnostician Tom More can readily observe the effects of the collapse of the social order fueled by the ideology of autonomous reason and science in his patients. Raskolnikov’s dream of invasive germs infecting Europe become in More’s world the “noxious particles” in the atmosphere that “rive the very self from itself,” splitting the self into bipolar impulses toward “angelism” and “bestialism.” Angelism infects the self with Gnostic, humanitarian dreams of perfecting mankind and creating a utopian social order. But the dream is always undermined by the bestial drives that propel the self toward unbridled sensual gratification. Observing both extreme symptoms in his patients, More asks, “Why does human5. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans., introduction David Magarshack (New York: Penguin, 1951), 555. 6. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans., annotated Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 303.

Love in the Ruins / The Thanatos Syndrome 

251

ism lead to bestialism?” The “center did not hold” either ontologically or psychologically. Riven from his true, spiritual essence, which for Percy and Dostoevsky is rooted in conscience and personal freedom, the self becomes possessed by demonic forces that work for its ruin. Among Dostoevsky’s nay-sayers, Ivan Karamazov claimed “a beast of rage and sensual inflammability in every man,” while Ivan’s Grand Inquisitor argued that men prefer slavery and material comfort to freedom and moral responsibility and that this “natural” preference would lead to bestialism and slavery to totalitarian power.7 Tom More’s troubles come from the fact that he too suffers from the angelism/bestialism split. In his case, it takes the form of a conflict between his ethical and religious self. As a scientist who invented the moquul, the lapsometer that can diagnose mankind’s “fall” from true being under God, More can fathom the spiritual ills of the age. With overweening pride, he hopes to perfect the lapsometer, cure man’s ontological flaw, and save civilization, and thereby achieve fame as mankind’s savior. Rational science would triumph and eventually fulfill secular humanism’s utopian dreams. But More is also torn by unappeased erotic “longing,” desires of the flesh embodied in lust for his three amours—lusty cellist Lola Rhodes, Moira the nurse from Fedville’s Love Clinic, and his righteous nurse Ellen Ogle­ thorpe. Further complicating More’s identity as scientist-inventor is his engrained ethical sense and his real but weak ties to the Catholic faith and the church. An admitted sinner, he is plagued by guilt and sorrow over his sexual sins. He prays to heaven, “Dear God, I can see it now, that it is you I love in the beauty of the world and all the lovely girls and dear good friends,” and that we are all “wayfarers on a journey, not pigs nor angels.” He invokes the aid of his ancestor, Sir Thomas More, asking the saint to pray for him.8 He recognizes the right ethical path, but refuses to follow it, trapped in the contradiction elucidated by St. Paul (Rom 7:14–20).9 Accept7. Ibid., 241–42, 251–53. 8. Percy, Love in the Ruins, 109. 9. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death, trans., introduction Walter Lowrie (1941; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955), 221–22. More’s “contradiction” is an example of what Kierkegaard called “high comedy,” that is, the predicament of a person who knows the good but refuses to do it. In contrast, “low comedy” is the antic behavior of a person unaware of his predicament.

252 

Walker Percy

ing that his fornication with Lola is a sin, More admits that he feels no guilt for the act. He tells his friend Max Gottlieb, “That’s what worries me: not feeling guilty.” Without feeling guilty, confessing his sins, and promising to amend his ways, he knows “the sin cannot be forgiven.” Max offers to help him “condition away the contradiction and erase any guilt feelings by treatment in the Skinner box,” behaviorism’s device for eradicating qualms of conscience. But More wisely recognizes that without guilt feelings and the prod of conscience, his essential humanity would be destroyed. Without the “contradiction,” he tells Max, “I’d really be up the creek.” 10 He would have no spiritual “life” in him. Even though More recognizes his guilty, flawed character, he is determined to perfect his lapsometer and cure mankind’s riven self. He presumes to act as a Christ-like savior. Percy undercuts More’s vain dream by emphasizing his pride and crippling despair, which leads him at Christmastime to drunkenness, fornication, and attempted suicide. Rescued drunk in a ditch by friends, More comes to see himself as a travesty of the true Christ, a mock savior suited to the age of disbelief. Staring at his reflection in the pocked mirror of the tavern, he sees himself as “the new Christ, the spotted Christ, the maculate Christ, the sinful Christ. The old Christ died for our sins and it didn’t work, we were not reconciled. The new Christ shall reconcile man with his sins. The new Christ lies drunk in a ditch.” 11 Percy’s ironic characterization of More as a “new Christ” who can reconcile man to his sins (not to God) reinforces Percy’s broader attack on the would-be secular saviors bent on creating a utopian society. Apropos Percy’s critique, Rene Girard has demonstrated how this “caricature Christianity,” a program to relieve victims’ sufferings without reference to the cross, shaped modern secular humanism in the twentieth century.12

6 Percy’s Fedville is an updated version of Dostoevsky’s Crystal Palace in Notes from Underground, as I have already suggested. The Palace, erected for the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, stood for the author as a symbol of the dehumanization of individuals governed by the iron laws of reason 10. Percy, Love in the Ruins, 117, 118. 11. Ibid., 153. 12. Rene Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2001), 161–67.

Love in the Ruins / The Thanatos Syndrome 

253

and science alone, thereby robbing citizens of their most “precious” quality, “our personality and individuality.” Free choice is destroyed; humans are reduced to “piano keys” and “numbers,” to automatons living and working in an “anthill” society.13 Percy’s Fedville takes the perverse application of the laws of reason and science and the goals and methods of scientism one step further by focusing technological power on the most intimate activities of human life—love and death. The goal of Love Clinic is to diagnose and correct any sexual activity that can be empirically measured and manipulate dysfunctional behavior to achieve perfect sexual performance in the subjects. Matters of soul, spirit, subjectivity, and genuine love are reduced to simple gratification of natural, erotic drives. At the other extreme is Fedville’s geriatric program, which mandates euthanasia for citizens deemed no longer functional under their utilitarian criteria. Dostoevsky did not imagine this deadly application of scientism, nor its more demonic use on a general population by Weimar physicians and the Nazi regime, or by Russian psychiatrists and technocrats in the twentieth century. But he certainly recognized the potential for such a perverse ideology, as we saw in the nihilist Shigalov’s argument for the extermination of “a hundred million heads,” if necessary, to create a utopian society.14

6 To develop the intellectual argument at the heart of Love in the Ruins, Percy created a triadic tension between Fedville and its minions, Fr. Rinaldo Smith, and Tom More. The three-sided debate is centered on language and its meaning and on freedom. The relationship between More and Fr. Smith focuses on a familiar Percyean paradox. As a diagnostic psychiatrist, More ostensibly believes in the power of language to help patients gain true self-knowledge and personal freedom. But as the scientist-inventor of the lapsometer, he has already been half-seduced by technology’s manipulative power over individuals. Fr. Smith, on the other hand, represents the power of the Word made flesh in Christ, but he has stopped preaching because “the word is not getting through,” the Good News is “being jammed” by the 13. Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans. ed. Michael R. Katz (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 17–21. 14. Dostoevsky, Demons, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, introduction Joseph Frank (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), 405–8.

254 

Walker Percy

“principalities and powers” now in control.15 Fedville, with its materialistbehaviorist ideology, along with the devilish Art Immelmann, manifests those demonic powers in the novel. It espouses scientism’s fundamental view of man as simply a natural organism among organisms, not a creature of God with a transcendent destiny. It rejects the ontological view of human beings as embodiments of the mystery of being, creatures endowed with spiritual integrity and an unquenchable desire for transcendence beyond the natural world. More recognized himself as such a spiritual being early in the novel.16 As I have argued elsewhere, although Fedville proports to fulfill secular humanism’s dream of individual self-fulfillment and personal freedom, it is totalitarian in its principles and practices.17 Given its behaviorist zeitgeist and technological expertise, it would eventually create the “anthill” society Dostoevsky warned about in Notes from Underground. Fedville becomes center stage for the debate over the meaning of language and human freedom, issues that point to the radically fundamental question: What is man? As we have seen, for Percy, the individual’s spiritual integrity, freedom, and moral responsibility are expressed in mankind’s essential human capacity: the power to name and define reality. The ultimate source of this power for Percy the Catholic semiotician is the divine Word revealed in the “good news” of the gospel and what philosopher Charles Taylor called the “ontic Logos.” As Taylor argued, the slow decline of belief in the ontic Logos since the fifteenth century brought with it a fundamental shift away from an ontology that viewed language as rooted in Scholastic realism and toward an ontology based on linguistic nominalism. In the succeeding centuries, key concepts such as “human dignity,” “the rights of man,” “reason,” “will,” and “individual freedom” underwent radical transformation.18 By the twentieth century Percy saw this radical shift as a wholesale corruption of language’s meaning, one that reflected the general deformation of being under the sway of scientism. In the novel his attack on this corruption is played 15. Percy, Love in the Ruins, 184–85. 16. Ibid., 109. 17. John F. Desmond, Walker Percy’s Search for Community (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 123–24. 18. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 186–92.

Love in the Ruins / The Thanatos Syndrome 

255

out in the conflict over words’ meaning between Tom More and the representatives of Fedville’s zeitgeist, Drs. Gottlieb and Brown and, by extension, by the devious minion of Satan the “father of lies,” Art Immelmann. More argues with Gottlieb and Brown about the meaning of terms such as “the dignity of the individual,” “guilt,” “freedom,” and the “quality of life,” terms that for Percy have become the jargon of secular humanism, their meaning capable of manipulation by any individual user.19 Truth becomes totally relative. Percy dramatizes the crucial importance of the issue of words’ meaning by making language—human speech—the focus of the debate between More and Buddy Brown over whether octogenarian Mr. Ives should be sent to the Happy Isles to be euthanized. The basic issue at stake is: Is he a human being, or is he a nonfunctional organism fit for disposal? More defeats Buddy Brown in the Pit arena by getting the angry, mute Mr. Ives to talk, proving his humanity against Brown’s claim that he is senile and comatose and therefore eligible for euthanasia. Mr. Ives, himself a Peircean semiotician, stopped talking to silently protest the silly diversions and games engaged in by the elderly at the Seniors Center. Saved by More, he is now free to pursue his vocation as linguistic anthropologist and writer. But More’s triumph with Mr. Ives is short-lived. Tempted by Immelmann’s offer of fame (a possible Nobel Prize) and unabated sensual happiness (wine, women, and song)—an appeal to his angelism/bestialism—More signs a patent agreement with Immelmann to allow him to mass-produce the lapsometer. Immelmann’s temptation of More is a comic equivalent of the Grand Inquisitor’s offer of the kingdom of earth to Christ if he will bow down to Satan. The result of More’s “fall” to the tempter is violence and chaos when Immelmann “zaps” the entire Pit audience with the lapsometer and a riot ensues.

6 Despite the chaos caused by his devil’s bargain with Immelmann and the misuse of his lapsometer (science’s destructive power), More is still determined to fulfill his dual dream of glory as the inventor-savior of mankind and as a Don Juan lover of Lola and Moira. But his inner voice of conscience and truth constantly remind him of the only path to salvation from his 19. Percy, Love in the Ruins, 110–11, 186–87.

256 

Walker Percy

riven angelic/bestial self. More accepts St. Thomas Aquinas’s wisdom that “knowing (truth) is man’s happiness.” His inner spirit of truth, “his belief in words that mean and name the real,” enables him “to recognize and finally expose the contradictions in the Fedville ideology, as well as name the temptations that entrap him, and confess his faults.” 20 Spiritually sunk in despair and guilt, More sees that he cannot heal or save himself, certainly not by science or human wisdom alone. In addition to repentance, he needs divine help, grace, to heal his soul. His fall into despair began with the death of his daughter Samantha and his wife, Doris’s, elopement. Percy links the deceased Samantha’s crucial role in the novel to the action of the sacraments, especially Christ the Word made flesh in the Eucharist, which More calls “the thread in the labyrinth.” His happiest memories are of attending Mass with Samantha and receiving the Eucharist. Those were “the best of times . . . we having received communion and I rejoicing afterwards, caring naught for my fellow Catholics but only myself and Samantha and Christ swallowed, remembering what he promises me for swallowing him, that I would have life in me and I did, feeling so good that I’d sing and cut the fool all the way home like King David before the ark.” But after Samantha’s death he quit going to Mass and receiving the Eucharist. Instead of taking communion, he “feasts” on his daughter’s death, taking “a secret satisfaction in her death, a delectation of tragedy, a license for drink, a taste of both for taste’s sake.” But the recurrent memory of Samantha and her warning to him not to sin against the Holy Spirit by rejecting God’s grace enables More to reject the satanic Immelmann’s temptations and, after praying to St. Thomas More, banish the tempter “into the smoke swirling beyond the bunker.” 21 As a cautionary tale Percy’s comic, post-apocalyptic satire ends on a mixed note of warning and hope. What began on a note of social and political chaos does not lead to a literal “end of the world” or final apocalypse. As we shall see, Percy warns against the fatalism inherent in any literal interpretation of the Revelation to John. A measure of social order is restored to the community. Although the black revolutionaries’ dream of creating a utopian order under their rule fails, the Bantus have gained political power 20. Desmond, Walker Percy’s Search for Community, 125. 21. Percy, Love in the Ruins, 13, 374, 376–77.

Love in the Ruins / The Thanatos Syndrome 

257

by asserting their property rights, a modest abatement of the “original sin” of white America against them.22 But as Gary Ciuba has argued, following Percy, an “apocalypse” in consciousness has already occurred, a deformation of the human mind that makes modern man vulnerable to angelism/bestialism.23 For his part, protagonist More has recovered his human self and abandoned his Gnostic dream of becoming a world-savior, though he still hopes to improve the lapsometer to help his patients, not just to achieve fame.24 Five years after the initial revolution, he lives with his wife, Ellen, and two children, carrying on a modest practice as a humble psychiatrist-physician, independent of Fedville. More importantly, More has partially recovered his “connection” to the church, now a remnant community, and the sacraments. As in The Moviegoer, Percy sets the final movement of the novel within the larger liturgical framework that evokes the transcendent world that interpenetrates the mundane order. With this framework Percy suggests the ongoing presence of Christ in the present time of “watching and waiting.” Christ’s presence is manifested in More’s going to confession, accepting penance for his sins, and receiving the Eucharist on Christmas Eve. When More fishes in the bayou and catches “a great unclassified beast of a fish,” he thinks of the triumphant return of Christ in the second coming: “I thought of Christ coming again at the end of the world and that, even knowing this, there is nevertheless some reason, what with the spirit of the new age being the spirit of watching and waiting, to believe that—.” 25 More’s inconclusive, open-ended recollection of the promise of the second coming balances the novel’s cautionary message between the threats of dehumanization and spiritual chaos manifested in the Fedville ideology and Satan’s activity in the world and the hope of mankind’s recovery of a fully human self whose spiritual integrity and freedom find their ultimate source in the divine Creator and the Word made flesh.

22. Ibid., 385. 23. Gary Ciuba, Walker Percy: Books of Revelation (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), 5–18. 24. Percy, Love in the Ruins, 361. 25. Ibid., 365.

258 

Walker Percy

The Thanatos Syndrome

If we were to imagine Dostoevsky living and writing in America in the last half of the twentieth century, we could well imagine him writing a novel similar to The Thanatos Syndrome. Percy’s second cautionary tale of the trials of Dr. Tom More living in the age of thanatos, or “love of death,” can be seen, even more directly than in Love in the Ruins, as a fulfillment of Dostoevsky’s somber prophesies about the suicidal trend in modern civilization he anticipated in Notes from Underground, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov. From his vantage point in mid-nineteenth-century Russia, Dostoevsky warned what could happen if Russia and the West abandoned belief in God and Christ in favor of the neo-pagan ideologies of reason and science, exclusive secular humanism, materialism, and utopianism. Percy’s final novel offers a similarly somber warning, with the notable difference that the malaise of “thanatos” is more widespread in Percy’s America than in Dostoevsky’s Russia, where Orthodox Christianity still exercised a strong influence among the common people. The general spiritual malaise in The Thanatos Syndrome is keynoted near the beginning of the novel when protagonist More describes reading a history of World War I, especially the Battle of the Somme. That battle and the Battle of Verdun seem to him to mark “the beginning of a new age, an age not named.” He observes that “in the course of those two battles, two million young men were killed toward no describable end. As Freud might have said, the age of thanatos had begun.” 26 Echoing Dostoevsky’s prophetic warnings, Percy could well have said that an “age of suicide” had begun. At the same time, both authors offer a slim message of hope in the face of the suicidal impulses of the age. As I stated earlier, The Thanatos Syndrome is a much more grim, tragic, and alarming novel than its prequel, Love in the Ruins. For the most part, harsh realism and a more directly political perspective replace the quasi-fantasy and humor of its predecessor. Set in the modern-day “present” of Feliciana parish (the late 1970s and early 1980s), its focus is riveted on many contemporary issues: the widespread dehumanization and “loss of self” and of personal freedom in the general population, symbolized by the use and misuse of mind-altering drugs; government-authorized programs of euthanasia 26. Percy, The Thanatos Syndrome (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987), 86.

Love in the Ruins / The Thanatos Syndrome 

259

and pedeuthanasia; the erosion of ethical standards; the “disappearance” of the sense of evil and Satan; the decline of belief in Christianity; and the spread of AIDS and pedophilia. Moreover, in The Thanatos Syndrome, narrator More is no longer the firm believer of his previous incarnation, as I noted earlier. Now an ex-Catholic, he still retains his astute diagnostic skills as observer-psychiatrist and an ethical conscience that serves him in the crisis over the Blue Boy project and at Belle Ame. Percy’s more direct strategy in the sequel was to create More as a representative postmodern figure—that is, a fallible character of conscience with humane values, but without a core of religious beliefs to buttress his laudable actions. Consequently, his intellectual frame of understanding is more limited. Although he justifiably prides himself as an analyst on being able to discover “connections” between events and his patients’ unique symptoms, he is unable to grasp the radical connections that link events in Feliciana parish to their larger historical and religious significance of events as viewed from an eschatological perspective. No longer a believer, More cannot clearly see the deeply satanic forces at work to promote the corruption of language and the dehumanizing of citizens into slaves of comfort, diversion, and sensuality. For that vision he needs the wisdom of the news-bearer Fr. Rinaldo Smith, who assumes the major role in expressing Percy’s cautionary message. As in my discussion of Love in the Ruins, I plan to elucidate some major themes in The Thanatos Syndrome and point out how Percy developed his vision further through More’s continuing struggles against the “principalities and powers” that threaten individuals’ spiritual integrity and freedom. In comparison to the major Dostoevsky works I have considered, perhaps the most direct parallels in theme and tone are between The Thanatos Syndrome, Notes from Underground, and Demons. While true in several respects, as we shall see later, an equally strong parallel can, I believe, be seen in the triadic moral “debate” Percy stages between Father Smith, the Grand Inquisitor, and the elder Zosima. This “debate,” as I call it, sheds light on the theme of language and its corruption by lies—the “loss” of the meaning of words and the Word—which for Percy is the primary modern symptom of the “loss of self.”

6

260 

Walker Percy

Tom More’s role as diagnostician of the loss of self is the focus of the central ethical conflict he faces in the novel. Understanding Percy’s use of the phrase “loss of self” is a key to the novel’s larger prophetic meaning. In “Diagnosing the Modern Malaise,” as we recall, he described the loss of self as a condition of “ontological deprivation,” that is, a loss or deprivation of being, personal sovereignty, and freedom.27 Percy’s ontology of man is metaphysical and anthropological. Like Dostoevsky, his anthropology is grounded in the traditional Christian view of man as a creature of God endowed with spiritual dignity and freedom. The opposite, “ontologically deprived” view of man, as Percy often reiterated, defines human beings as simply higher organisms in nature and thus determined by fixed natural laws. The latter view is implicit in the many secular ideologies both authors saw as a threat to mankind. “Loss of self” is a death-in-life or spiritually suicidal condition. Part of the ethical conflict More faces stems from his ambivalent attitude toward the use of therapeutic drugs to relieve patients’ symptoms. As a leader in cortical function research, he is clearly invested in the advancement of pharmaceutical therapy. He is also sympathetic to the general humanitarian goals of such research and its application to relieve patients’ suffering and to promote their well-being. What he initially objects to in the Blue Boy project is the secret doping of patients, not the goals themselves. The project run by the Fedville physicians John Van Dorn and Bob Comeau is a gross violation of medical ethics. Their goal is not to palliate needy patients’ conditions, but to pursue a utopian goal of eliminating human limitations and produce a “purer” master group of automatons enslaved to dehumanizing drugs. It is a mistake, however, to see the Blue Boy project as only an extreme, fugitive program that More eventually overcomes with the help of his cousin-epidemiologist Lucy Lipscomb. As the rest of the novel makes clear, Percy intended the renegade project to stand as an extreme example for the general “doping” or “zonking out” of citizens in the culture, whose individual freedom is being subverted by the larger forces of conformity in a technologically driven society seemingly addicted to good health, comfort, and earthly happiness. Added to this theme is postmodern society’s growing dependence on drugs, foreshadowed by the 27. Percy, “Diagnosing the Modern Malaise,” in Signposts in a Strange Land, ed., introduction Patrick Samway (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 210.

Love in the Ruins / The Thanatos Syndrome 

261

Blue Boy project. Yet even without drugs, Percy suggests, in the general deformation of consciousness under scientism, modern citizens on the whole have already suffered a “loss of self.” As a practicing therapist, More describes himself as an “old school” psychiatrist and disciple of Sigmund Freud and Harry Stack Sullivan, both of whom promoted the psychoanalytic method, the “talking cure,” as the best way for patients to gain self-knowledge and a measure of freedom from crippling neuroses. More’s thinking has also be shaped by Charles Sanders Peirce, the American philosopher and founder of modern semiotics who, as More notes, believed that all seemingly disconnected events are intrinsically related and that “one can connect them.” 28 Discovering the connections between events (and missed connections) for both More and the reader is the key to understanding Percy’s strategy in developing the overall vision of the novel. More’s astute ability to discover connections is crucial for uncovering the nefarious Blue Boy plot, but, as we shall see, Fr. Smith is the more perceptive Peircean in his ability to link the individual events in present-day Feliciana parish to their deeper historical and religious meaning. More begins his search to diagnose the loss of self by connecting the common symptoms he observes in patients Mickey LaFaye, handyman Frank Macon, Donna T., Enrique Busch, Ella Murdock Smith, and his wife, Ellen. None of them present the “old symptoms—the ancient anxiety, guilt, obsessions, rage repressed, sex suppressed.” All seem “happy,” but also “diminished.” 29 They are disconnected from any immediate context of meaning and exhibit the loss of “a certain sense of self-awareness.” They give unemotional, rote responses to More’s questions, like idiot-savants or robots. Most importantly, their level of language has regressed to that of a three-year-old child, using three- or four-word responses. For Percy, of course, developed language signifies maturing self-consciousness. The linguistic infantilizing of his patients is a foreboding sign of the diminishment of the self to a child-like state of dependence (and potential abuse), a theme graphically exposed later in the actions of the pedophiles at Belle Ame, which is echoed more remotely in the Grand Inquisitor’s plan to re28. Percy, Thanatos Syndrome, 68. 29. Ibid., 85.

262 

Walker Percy

duce all citizens to passive, docile children under his rule. More’s female patients and his wife, Ellen, exhibit sexual behavior regressed to primate level, “presenting” to him sexually without inhibition when he meets them, Percy’s further exploration of the theme of bestial sexuality developed in his earlier novels. Percy deepens the implications of More’s diagnoses of the loss of language / loss of self in his first conversation with Father Smith in the fire tower. As I have noted, the priest’s decisive role as a prophetic news-bearer is greatly expanded from Love in the Ruins, becoming crucial to the sequel’s meaning. In addition, his position as a prophetic fire watcher who interprets the signs of moral conflagration in society serves, I will argue, as a strong counter-vision to the Grand Inquisitor’s deterministic vision of human history, symbolized by the latter’s interpretation of the Tower of Babel story in Genesis. Symbolically, Fr. Smith’s fire tower stands in opposition to the Inquisitor’s Tower of Babel. As we saw in Love in the Ruins, the priest has again stopped preaching and retired to the tower because “the words no longer signify; they have been deprived of meaning.” Traditional religious language has been “emptied out,” and along with it the search for metaphysical truth. Conditioned by scientism and nominalism, modern thought gives credence only to immanent, practical realities. “It is not a question of belief or unbelief,” Smith says. “Even if God’s existence, heaven, hell and sin were proved,” it would make no difference. Words have been deprived of meaning by a “depriver,” whom the priest later names as Satan. Fr. Smith argues that the only sign that has not been deprived of meaning is “the Jews.” As the original chosen people of God still present in the world, “they are a sign of God’s presence which cannot be eliminated.” As a unique sign in human history, they cannot be “subsumed” into a general category or emptied of meaning. Referring to St. Paul, he tells More that “salvation comes from the Jews as Scripture tells us.” 30 The Jews brought to history the vision and words of the prophets, who define history in terms of God’s salvation plan. The prophetic vision of the prophets was implanted in human consciousness and language, so that even if every actual Jew is destroyed, the imprint of that vision and plan for mankind’s salvation—the 30. Ibid., 117, 123, 124.

Love in the Ruins / The Thanatos Syndrome 

263

divine Word spoken by the prophets and by Christ—cannot be evacuated of meaning, though many despots and “theorists” have tried. Father Smith’s argument is a warning to More (and Percy’s to the readers) about the destructive precedents set by the Fedville qualitarian doctors’ programs of euthanasia and pedeuthanasia, now authorized by the Supreme Court. The priest maintains that the fact that the Jews cannot be assimilated under a class, category, or theory “is an offense to liberal-minded, sentimental scientists and intellectuals” with “the purest humanitarian ideals.” The Holocaust, he insists, was an attempt to eradicate the Jews because they are a sign of God’s presence in history that “could not be eliminated.” 31 Nazism’s attempt to eradicate the Jews, as Rene Girard argued, was also an attempt to eliminate Christ the Word and his gospel message.32 The fact that More cannot fully understand the “connection” between Fr. Smith’s interpretation of the immediate signs of the “loss of self” and the priest’s broader historical-religious vision almost proves Percy’s point about the emptying out of language. More is more interested in his friend’s physical and psychological condition. Consequently, the priest decides to make his point bluntly. He tells More that he is a member of the generation of doctors who have abandoned the Hippocratic oath and are willing to permit the killing of “millions of old, useless people, unborn children, born malformed children, for the good of mankind—and do so without a single murmur from one of you.” If such programs continue, Smith warns, “you’re going to end up killing Jews. Tenderness is the first disguise of the murderer.” 33 Smith’s argument points to the key ethical question More faces and, more broadly, the question the age must face about its commitment to a progressive neo-pagan liberal ideology.

6 The ideology underlying the Blue Boy project is fostered by the zeitgeist of Fedville, which can be seen, as I have argued, as Percy’s updated, technologically advanced version of Dostoevsky’s Crystal Palace. That ideology is espoused by Doctor Bob Comeau in a lengthy conversation with More after the latter’s first talk with Father Smith. More’s situation has become tri31. Ibid., 126. 32. Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 170–81. 33. Percy, Thanatos Syndrome, 126, 129.

264 

Walker Percy

ply complicated since his release from prison. While trying to discover the source of his patients’ and his wife’s loss of self, he is under pressure to join the Fedville team as the resident expert on cortical function. Estranged from his wife, Ellen, he indulges in a night of drinking, drugging, and fornication with his epidemiologist cousin, Lucy Lipscombe, who helps him begin to unravel the Blue Boy plot after revealing to More his wife, Ellen’s, affair with John Van Dorn. More voices his objection to the Blue Boy project as he and Comeau drive through the forest in his Mercedes, with Strauss’s “Tales of the Vienna Woods” playing on the car tape deck. Percy broadens the implications of Comeau’s liberal humanitarian ideology by linking him, through his German car and love of Strauss, to the nineteenthcentury decadent German romanticism that was dark prelude to the medical experiments performed by German physicians during the Weimar Republic and later, horribly, by Nazi physicians and other despots. Comeau defends the doping project as a way to improve human beings by increasing dopamine and endorphin levels to create a “drug-free” high, increase “healthy sexual libido,” decrease any “inhibiting functions in the cortex” (Freud’s super-ego), enhance cognitive and memory functions, and reduce anxiety, crime, child abuse, AIDS, and teenage suicide—all geared toward the utopian goal of producing well-adjusted, happy, sexually permissive, and productive citizens in a well-ordered society. Comeau ignores the fact that the subjects would be dependent on brain-changing stimulants. More cuts through Comeau’s abstract jargon and objects that the Blue Boy program is a violation of a citizen’s civil rights because they are “assaulting the cortex of the individual” without the subject’s knowledge or consent, a gross violation of personal freedom. Percy links the issues of drugging patients and denial of personal freedom to his central theme of the “loss” of human language. More asks, “What about language? You know, reading and writing. Like reading a book.” Comeau dismisses the question as antiquated. “These kids are way beyond comic books and Star Wars.” In effect, as More points out, “they use two-word sentences,” that is, language reduced to simple sign exchanges without the complexities and nuances of mature, human symbol-making that involves sophisticated syntactical relations between words and ideas and without any meaningful social, historical, or moral context. At the other extreme, Comeau’s own speech is

Love in the Ruins / The Thanatos Syndrome 

265

laced with liberal abstractions and jargon that obscure the truth of what he and Van Dorn are doing. For example, Comeau defends their euthanasia program by pointing to the Supreme Court’s “Right to Death” ruling, approved so that “unwanted children” need not suffer an impoverished life and so the unwanted elderly can “die with dignity.” Comeau’s philosophy is a “logical,” suicidal extension of the ideology and rationalist language Dostoevsky’s underground man saw epitomized in the Crystal Palace and later seen in the insane “logic” of the Weimar and Nazi physicians who euthanized children in the kinderhaus at Eglfing-Harr Hospital. But the strongest connection I wish to develop between Percy’s and Dostoevsky’s concerns with the loss of freedom, totalitarian slavery, and the corruption of language is between Father Smith, the news-bearer true prophet, and the Grand Inquisitor, false prophet and disciple of Satan. The image of the tower is the central symbol that represents the opposing historical-theological visions represented by each figure. The story of the Tower of Babel (Gn 11:1–9) is the centerpiece of the Inquisitor’s interpretation of the history of Christianity in the West. While he acknowledges that Jesus guaranteed mankind’s spiritual freedom when he rejected Satan’s three temptations in the desert, the Inquisitor claims that Jesus’ rejection of earthly power was a fatal mistake. The Inquisitor ignores the truth that Jesus’ refusal made possible freedom from sin and death; rather, he denounces Jesus for not guaranteeing earthly freedom from suffering. He examines Jesus’ alleged “mistake” by reference to the Tower of Babel story. In his reading of the Genesis account, mankind originally spoke one language and lived in unity under God. Eventually, they rebelled against God and attempted to build an earthly kingdom and a tower to heaven, rivaling God’s power. God’s punishment, the Inquisitor claims, was to “confuse” mankind into several languages and scatter them. Tribal rivalries and wars ensued, he says, because men are too weak, selfish, depraved, and rebellious to use freedom wisely. His view of mankind is Manichean; men are slavish “beasts.” To him, except for the few who are faithful to God, most men rejected Christ and the gospel and instead attempted to build a second Tower of Babel based on reason and science alone, again rivaling God. This is the Inquisitor’s view of history—mankind’s constant misuse of freedom, a persistent “confusion of tongues,” national and ethnic

266 

Walker Percy

rivalries, internecine warfare. Once again, he says, social chaos, rebellion, and fratricidal killing ensued from mankind’s choice to follow the ideology of exclusive reason and science. “Centuries will pass and mankind will proclaim with the mouth of its wisdom and science that there is no crime, and therefore no sin, but only hungry men.” Echoing his creator Ivan’s thinking, he implicitly blames Christ for “not shortening peoples’ suffering by a thousand years with their tower.” Their attempted autonomy brought “centuries more of the lawlessness of free reason, of their science and anthropophagy—for having begun to build their [second] Tower of Babel without us, they will end in anthropophagy [cannibalism].” Finally, the Inquisitor proclaims that mankind will renounce freedom and conscience and turn to his medieval church to relieve their suffering and be fed “earthly bread,” that is, to gain material comfort and earthly happiness. “In the end, they will lay their freedom at our feet and say: ‘Better you enslave us, but feed us.’ ” 34 In effect, having renounced freedom and conscience, they will become dependent “children” and slaves of an all-powerful ecclesiasticalpolitical power invested in the Roman Church. Several important caveats can be offered here about the Inquisitor’s argument. His reading of biblical history and the meaning of Christ’s resistance to Satan is obviously skewed in favor of his deterministic, fatalistic myth, as is his oversimplified interpretation of anthropology and of man’s moral capacities. For example, in his reading of Christian history he fails to mention Pentecost, an event that contrasts sharply with the Tower of Babel story—the descent of the Holy Spirit into history that enabled the disciples to proclaim the gospel message of the Kingdom of God to men of various tongues. Second, much has been written about Dostoevsky’s many critical attacks on the medieval and modern Roman Church in the West for its assumption of secular power, certainly evident in his satiric view of the church in the Inquisitor’s narrative. However, the main point to emphasize in comparison to Percy’s argument in The Thanatos Syndrome, it seems to me, is Dostoevsky’s attack on the church as a totalitarian institution, one bent on destroying human freedom and assuming dictatorial power. Apropos this point, Percy once referred to the hegemony of the ideology of sci34. Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 261.

Love in the Ruins / The Thanatos Syndrome 

267

entism as the “Holy Office of the Secular Inquisition.” 35 Finally, it is worth repeating the obvious: that the Inquisitor is an admitted liar, a “depriver” of language’s true meanings. To achieve their goal of absolute power, the Inquisitor and his church must perpetrate the lie that they feed the people in the name of Christ. The masses will admire them “as gods” for having fulfilled their earthly desires. In perpetuating this deceit, the Inquisitor acts as an anti-Christ, mock “savior”-suffering servant who pretends to sacrifice himself for the good of mankind. Now a disciple of Satan, he presumes to alleviate human suffering without Christ, practicing what Girard calls a “caricature Christianity” based on a secular humanitarian view that is a sentimental corruption of Christ’s message about the cost of salvation being spiritual discipline, suffering, and self-denial. Girard maintains that modern neo-pagan humanism, with its concern for victims, developed from and in reaction to the traditional Christian ethic of charity. Its concern for victims is “the secular mask of Christian love.” It displaces Christ as the innocent victim who redeems mankind from sin in favor of so-called earthly saviors whose goal is the utopian dream to ultimately eliminate suffering. To Girard, “We are living through a caricatural ‘ultra-Christianity’ that tries to escape from the Judeo-Christian orbit by ‘radicalizing’ the concern for victims in an anti-Christian manner.” 36 Girard’s insight seems especially germane to the Inquisitor and unwitting modern followers such as Comeau and Van Dorn. Having himself despaired of Christ and pledged allegiance to Satan, the Inquisitor and his minions plan to “finish the tower,” defeat Christ, and proclaim themselves “sole rulers of the earth.” Their goal, Dostoevsky makes clear, is absolute totalitarian power and control over a world of “happy,” conscience-less, comfortable “children” living in an “anthill” society.37 Dostoevsky’s counter-argument to the Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov is presented in book 6, chapter 3, “From the Talks and Homilies of Elder Zosima.” Zosima argues that as men have rejected Christ, “the world has proclaimed freedom, but what do we see in this freedom of theirs: only slavery, and suicide. The world says, ‘You have needs, therefore satisfy 35. Percy, “Interview with Zoltan Abadi-Nagy,” in Signposts, 394. 36. Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 163–65, 179. 37. Percy, Thanatos Syndrome, 253, 257.

268 

Walker Percy

them.’ ” Science, “which is subject to the senses, cannot fulfill the spiritual world, the higher half of man’s being.” Anticipating the future age, Zosima rejects the secularists’ dream that science and technology will help create unity among men. “We are assured that the world is becoming more unified, is being formed into brotherly communion, by the shortening of distances, by the transmitting of thoughts through the air. Also, do not believe in such a unity of people.” The neo-pagans, he argues, “take freedom to mean the increase and prompt satisfaction of needs,” and so “instead of serving brotherly love and human unity, they have fallen, on the contrary, into disunity and isolation.” 38 Zosima’s antidote to this ideology is that men must fast and pray to attain “freedom of spirit” and “liberation from things and habits” and become the “servant of all.” In The Thanatos Syndrome, Fr. Smith’s prophetic words from the fire tower offer Percy’s counter-argument to the Inquisitor’s reading of history and anthropology in the sense that the priest’s warning to More points to Fedville as the modern Tower of Babel, the locus of the neo-pagan ideology of reason and science that would undermine genuine human freedom. Its “confusion of tongues” is typified by Comeau’s pseudo-humanitarian jargon in defense of the Blue Boy project. To be sure, Fr. Smith would not disagree with the Inquisitor concerning mankind’s misuse of freedom; neither would Dostoevsky and Percy disagree to some extent. The descent into that bestialism the Inquisitor predicted as an outcome of man’s allegiance to an ethic of reason and science alone becomes evident in the sexual bestialism and pedophilia Percy emphasizes in the novel, as well as in the qualitarians’ attempt to eradicate “crime” and “sin” by human means alone. In their sexual promiscuity More’s drugged patients and wife are reduced to “children” of nature fulfilling natural, erotic drives, a degradation Percy reinforces in the pedophilia committed by the perverse adults at Belle Ame Academy.

6 After his first conversation with Fr. Smith, More is still undecided about what to do regarding the secret doping plot and whether to accept Comeau’s offer to join the Fedville qualitarian team. As a physician he is committed 38. Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 314–15.

Love in the Ruins / The Thanatos Syndrome 

269

to reducing human suffering, but without diminishing patients’ personal choice, now compromised by dehumanizing drugs. At the core of More’s dilemma and his debate with Comeau about euthanizing elderly patients and unwanted children is the broader moral debate over the meaning and value of human suffering. In raising this issue, Percy clearly echoed the famous discussion of suffering by Alyosha and Ivan Karamazov (and the Grand Inquisitor).39 As we saw in their discussion, Ivan rejects a God who permits the gratuitous suffering of children. In his rejection, Ivan takes the humanitarian’s stance as one deeply attuned to human misery in general, not just children. As a moralist Ivan considers unrelieved human suffering to be a scandal and a gross injustice to mankind. Much to his credit, he takes the question of God’s provenience and of the soul’s immortality seriously. Still, he renounces a God who allows human suffering to persist, as the Inquisitor also condemned Christ for allowing the freedom that led to more human suffering. The cardinal’s focus is riveted on earthly physical and emotional suffering, without recompense by faith in Christ’s redemption or by belief in eternal justice. Unlike Ivan, neither Comeau nor Van Dorn is concerned about God, the soul, eternal justice, or man’s immortality. As neo-pagan humanitarians their aim is to eradicate human limitations as part of their utopian dream. But a fundamental question underlying the issue of human suffering is an anthropological one: what is a human being, and what is the purpose of life? This is the anthropological and ethical question More must weigh after his first conversation with Fr. Smith. As we saw, qualitarians Comeau and Van Dorn consider human beings simply as natural creatures who can be improved and fulfilled through science (drugs), and whose existence ends only in death. As Comeau explained to More, their goal is to cure human “imperfections” and promote “happiness” for the masses, even at the cost of personal freedom. Their “big lie” repeats the big lie of Ivan’s Inquisitor. Their strictly instrumentalist logic pales in comparison to Ivan’s genuine anguish over human suffering and the tragic dimension of his great 39. Percy’s treatment of the theme of suffering may also be indebted to the debate between Abbot Zerchi and Dr. Cors in Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Liebowitz (Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1959), 270–311. Percy wrote a favorable review of Miller’s novel and adopted elements of it for the “Space Odyssey” section of Lost in the Cosmos (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983).

270 

Walker Percy

refusal of faith—Dostoevsky’s ominous foreshadowing of the postmodern age. Nevertheless, Ivan and the qualitarians are similar in that the force behind their views is a presumed “tenderness” and pity toward suffering humanity, which in the qualitarians’ case is a mask for power, the control and manipulation of individuals without regard for their spiritual integrity. Fr. Smith’s anthropology is radically opposite that of Comeau and Van Dorn. His warning to More implicitly affirms individuals as spiritual beings created by God and destined for eternal life. He cautions More that the qualitarian ideology based on “tenderness” and mock pity (which Dostoevsky saw as disguised contempt for others) would eventually lead to the Holocaust and Stalin’s gulags. His warning echoes Flannery O’Connor’s well-known comment that an ideology based on “tenderness leads to forced labor camps and the gas chamber.” 40 More’s second conversation with Father Smith is a turning point in his decision to stop the secret activities of Comeau and Van Dorn. When he again visits the fire tower, he tells the priest of his further discoveries of the Blue Boy plot, of the qualitarians’ job offer (under threat of being returned to prison), and of the suspected sexual molestation of adolescents at Belle Ame. Despite these discoveries and pressures, More is nevertheless still impressed by Comeau’s “evidence for the program’s social betterment,” using heavy sodium drugs. He declares, “I’m not sure what I should do.” To enlighten More about the broader significance of the program, Fr. Smith decides to recount his experiences in Germany before and after World War II. “I’m afraid this concerns you,” he tells More. “I didn’t want to tell you but I’m afraid I have to. There is something you need to know.” The priest’s confession echoes the elder Zosima’s revelation of his proud, violent youth, of his realization of the sinfulness of all men (“guilt for everyone”), and his belief in the moral responsibility of all for all.41 As a teenager visiting cousins in 1930s Germany, Smith was incapable of understanding the significance of conversations he overheard between Dr. Jager and other prominent physicians as they discussed the recently published book The Release of the Destruction of Life Devoid of Value, written by Drs. Hoche and Binding. 40. Flannery O’Connor, “An Introduction to Memoir of Mary Ann,” in Collected Works (New York: Library of America, 1988), 227. 41. Percy, Thanatos Syndrome, 234, 238, 303–6.

Love in the Ruins / The Thanatos Syndrome 

271

He had no clue that it argued in favor of “the elimination of people who were useless,” patients who “suffer from hopeless diseases or defects like mongolism, severe epilepsy, encephalitis, progressive neurological diseases, mental defects, arteriosclerosis, hopeless schizophrenia, and so on.” 42 Rather than being repelled by their argument, the young Smith was enamored of his cousin Helmut, a member of the Hitler Jugend and future SS officer. He confesses that had he been German instead of American, he would have joined the elite Nazi corps that became instruments for carrying out Hitler’s program of extermination of Jews, those deemed “useless” to the Reich, and political and social dissidents. The priest’s confession, of course, is calculated to help More understand his own complicity in and responsibility for the qualitarians’ activities. More does not seem initially to fully grasp the connection, even though Fr. Smith refers to the “Louisiana Weimar physicians” at Fedville. To enforce his point, the priest adds a “Footnote” to his confession describing his later discovery of the “special department” where children were euthanized by Dr. Jager at Eglfing-Harr Hospital. An American soldier at the time, Smith only felt “interested” by the discovery, not horrified. His initial reaction, Percy suggests, is another sign of the deformed consciousness characteristic of the postmodern mind, whereby detached “interest” supplants the power of conscience. “We’ve got it wrong about horror,” he admits. “It doesn’t come naturally but takes some effort.” Nevertheless, More still seems puzzled by the priest’s confession and discovery in postwar Germany. “I’m not sure what you’re trying to tell me—about your memory of Germany.” Fr. Smith brings the point home when he says, bluntly, “In the end one must choose—life or death.” 43 Percy leaves open the question of whether More fully grasps the connection Fr. Smith has made between the Weimar-Nazi program of extermination, the Holocaust, the Supreme Court authorization of euthanasia, and the qualitarians’ ideology and practices. But after hearing the priest’s confession, More does “choose life” by stopping the Blue Boy project, rescuing the sexually abused children from Bon Ame Academy, and exposing the pedophiles. More’s exposure and defeat of the pedophiles’ activities at Bon Ame was 42. Ibid., 246. 43. Ibid., 254, 256, 257.

272 

Walker Percy

Percy’s final engagement in fiction with the theme of postmodern sexual dysfunction that he had developed since The Moviegoer. As we saw, in Lancelot he linked the theme of sexual abuse specifically to the violation of children in Lance’s obsession with his two daughters’ real and imagined seductions and in his sexual assault on the drugged “child,” actress Raine Robinette. Viewed in this context, the graphically described abuses committed by the multiple pedophiles at Bon Ame reveal the bestialism that inevitably follows from an ideology that exalts the fulfillment of natural appetites over truly human principles and values. The comic scene at Belle Ame, when More forces the pedophiles to drink the molar sodium solution that soon regresses them to ape-like behavior, reinforces Percy’s deeper point about the danger of regression to aberrant sexual behavior he saw in the pervasive violence and eroticism across American society. In contrast to this regression from humanity, we recall that Kierkegaard maintained that man’s full humanity could only be realized “transparently under God” by following the perfect model for fully realized humanity—Christ.44 Similarly, Girard argued from an evolutionary perspective that the historical process of hominization pointed toward mankind’s ultimate fulfillment by imitation of Christ, the model of human perfection.45 As a novelist Percy would never be this explicit or didactic, but the actions of More and Father Smith at the end of the novel in stopping the pedophiliacs and becoming “suffering servants” for others can be interpreted as a choice for life, an affirmation of mankind’s capacity for full humanity as understood in the Judeo-Christian sense. In the end, both More and Fr. Smith overcome personal weaknesses and commit themselves to helping others. Dourly pessimistic about the current state of society, the priest would prefer to retreat to his fire tower in solitude and contemplation like St. Simon Stylites. But instead he returns to manage the reopened St. Margaret’s Hospice, taking care of the dying, the AIDS patients, and malformed children. Having stopped the Blue Boy project and seeing Belle Ame closed down, More devises a plan to divert money 44. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death, 244–45. 45. See Girard’s comments on hominization and Christ in Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoit Chantre, trans. Mary Baker (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012), 118.

Love in the Ruins / The Thanatos Syndrome 

273

from the thwarted doping project and use it to reactivate the hospice. He is convinced that it is better to create some good from the nefarious program than to simply punish the offenders. “Don’t shoot Bob Comeau,” he tells Max, “use him.” 46 More returns to his humble practice as a psychiatrist helping patients through the “talking cure” and volunteering at the hospice. He has refused the job offer at Fedville, despite the urging of his wily cousin Lucy Lipscomb, who has designs on him for herself and told him he had “no other choice” but to accept the job. But More chooses otherwise and reunites with his wife, Ellen, now cured of drugging and returned to her normal self, no longer a super-human bridge champion.

6 In keeping with Percy’s usual practice of creating open-ended endings for his novels, the final scenes of The Thanatos Syndrome, as in Love in the Ruins, establishes a dialectical tension between possible apocalypse and hope, between the potential for social, moral, and psychic catastrophe and further “loss of self,” and the hope for a recovery of the self as a limited creature who may eventually be open to the “good news” of faith and a final defeat of the powers and principalities. On balance, however, the sequence of scenes before the ending, scenes that can be seen as a series of “epilogues” to the main plot action, seem more informed by Percy’s pessimism regarding the state of the contemporary postmodern world than otherwise. Percy’s satire on the “rehabilitation” of Bob Comeau and John Van Dorn is especially biting. After being first held in the Forensic Center for apes, Van Dorn recovers his humanity after bonding and talking with a female gorilla named Eve. Apropos a permissive, neo-pagan society, his prison sentence for sexual abuse is commuted by the governor, and he soon becomes a favorite on talk shows, discussing sexual behavior with sex therapist Dr. Ruth. Bob Comeau leaves Feliciana and returns to New York, having been hired by the Chinese government as a consultant for his expertise on “the humane disposal of newborn children,” like a reincarnated Weimar doctor.47 The restitution of the two culprits to good standing is a sign of the broader moral and social malaise represented in the novel—the pharmacological addictions and manipulations of the general public, the diminishment of per46. Percy, Thanatos Syndrome, 332. 47. Ibid., 345.

274 

Walker Percy

sonal freedoms, the corruption of language and ethical consciousness—all of which bodes ill for the future of the technologically advanced, morally regressed society. Percy’s broader critique is also reinforced when More and his family visit Disney World, a playground child-world version of the Crystal Palace and Fedville. More’s family visits “the Magic Kingdom, Tomorrowland, Adventureland, Mickey and Goofy,” and “Spaceship Earth,” attractions that offer fantastic escapes from the hard realities of drug-doping and addiction, euthanasia, violence, child-rape, and suicide. More the realist prefers to sit in the woods at “Fort Wilderness” reading “Stedman’s History of World War I.” When he chats with friendly retirees from Ohio and Canada, he notices that they all look “somewhat zapped,” and he has “the sensation that the world really ended in 1916 and we’ve been living in a dream ever since.” These are men who spent “their entire lives working, raising families, fighting Nazis, worrying about communism, yet they’ve really been zapped by something else. We haven’t been zapped by Nazis or communists.” Percy suggests they have been zapped by ontological deprivation, a deeper and more widespread “loss” of a fully human self. The apocalypse the age has suffered is other than a physical, social, or political catastrophe. The Blue Boy doping plot only signified a much more pervasive spiritually comatose state, a death-in-life. As More stands with the retirees in the Wilderness RV parking lot viewing “The Wonders of Tomorrowland” (as visitors to the Crystal Palace might have viewed another “Tomorrowland”), More wryly comments, “Tomorrowland!—we don’t even know what Todayland is!—fond, talkative, informative, and stunned, knocked in the head, like dreamwalkers in a moonscape!” 48 Percy balances the apocalyptic strain near the end of the novel with a slim hope for the recovery from the “loss of self,” perhaps only possible after some catastrophic collapse. Fr. Smith’s sermon at the reopening of St. Margaret’s Hospice and his celebration of the Mass dramatizes the cautionary/hopeful dichotomy. The priest warns the audience, many of whom are physicians, that though it is “not their fault,” the “Great Prince Satan, the Great Depriver, is here” and they “must resist him.” In the congrega48. Ibid., 338–40.

Love in the Ruins / The Thanatos Syndrome 

275

tion he discerns “benevolent feelings” and “tenderness,” but “no guilt,” a deadness of conscience that he calls Satan’s “masterpiece.” As he warned More earlier, he now warns the audience that “tenderness leads to the gas chamber.” He especially warns the Fedville physicians about their euthanasia program and pleads with them to send all patients deemed “unfit to live” to the hospice, where they will be lovingly cared for. Some of the dignitaries are offended and leave, while the rest of the audience feel “pure anxiety” at the priest’s odd behavior and harsh words, wondering if he is simply deranged. Percy does not say whether Fr. Smith’s warning has any practical effect on the physicians. But his warning has certainly affected More’s thoughts and actions, as we saw. He does not return to the Catholic faith he once held, except to help the priest when called. But the priest does not remonstrate with him about it. Instead, he tells More that it is not his fault, that “you have been deprived of the faith. All of you have. It is part of the times.” Yet in the midst of this somber judgment of the age, where Tom More stands as a representative citizen, Percy injects a religious message of hope when Fr. Smith tells More of the alleged apparitions of the Virgin Mary to six children at Medjugorge, Herznagovina, in 1981. Appearing as an “ordinary-looking red-cheeked Jewish girl,” she tells the children that all the horrors of the twentieth century have occurred because “God agreed to let the Great Prince Satan have his way with men for a hundred years.” Satan, she tells them, needs “no great evil scenes, no demons; all he had to do was leave us alone,” that is, leave human beings alone to act as autonomous individuals who follow the ideology of reason and science to build a second Tower of Babel, without God. Percy’s point of reference in the Virgin’s speech is, clearly, the book of Revelation, with its prophesy of the thousand-year reign of the Great Beast and the “principalities and powers” before their final defeat and the second coming of Christ. Despite the century’s many catastrophes, its engrained “delectation of doom” and affliction with a “thanatos syndrome,” the Virgin Mary encourages the children not to lose hope, as so many millions have. She tells them that “if you keep hope and have a loving heart and do not wish for the death of others, the Great Prince will not succeed in destroying the world.” More’s only comment is that he finds the story “interesting.” Nevertheless, he agrees to help

276 

Walker Percy

Fr. Smith by serving Mass when needed and fulfills his promise when he receives a coded message from the priest with hints of meeting “royalty, a visit, gifts—a Jewish connection,” a clue, of course, to assist at Mass on the feast of the Epiphany.49 What is the significance of Percy’s evocation of the Mass near the ending of both Love in the Ruins and The Thanatos Syndrome in terms of the Mass’s “connection” to the major themes of the “loss of self” and the threatened loss of personal freedom? As we have seen throughout this study, Percy frequently insisted that postmodern man has suffered an “ontological deprivation.” As a Catholic, Percy affirmed that the ontological mystery of the self and human freedom is verified by Christ’s incarnation into human history and by the mystery of the consecration enacted in the Mass. Stated more dogmatically, Christ’s continuing presence in the world, manifested in the Holy Eucharist, affirms an eschatological dimension in reality and history that supervenes the apocalyptic dimension so often embedded in the postmodern consciousness. As theologian James Alison declared, which I quoted earlier in Jesus’ prophesy of his crucifixion, “The process of the concentration of eschatology in the key Christological moments of the death and resurrection culminates in what is referred to as the ‘realized eschatology’ to be found in John’s gospel, where again it is the exaltation of the Son of Man on the Cross (Jn 3:14–15) that to eschaton irrupts into human history.” Put in simpler language, this “irruption” of the eschatological presence of God and “the new human relationality which that makes possible” is the real basis for hope and for action in the world. Alison adds that if apocalypse comes, it will not be “because of some future divine irruption in violence, but because [the world] is abandoned to itself,” so that “any ‘final’ apocalypse will be purely of human making, the outworking of the dynamism of death-related rivalistic desire.” 50 Like the Jews, the ontological mystery of being cannot be eradicated; it is a gift of being, symbolized by the chosen people and fulfilled, for Percy the believer, in the incarnation of Christ, the Word who is the source of hope. Ivan Karamazov’s Inquisitor lost faith in Christ and chose the path of rea49. Ibid., 364, 365, 369–70. 50. James Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong, foreword by Sebastian Moore (New York: Crossroad, 1998), 216–19 (my addition), and Girard, Battling to the End, 195–206.

Love in the Ruins / The Thanatos Syndrome 

277

son and science like the Fedville physicians Comeau and Van Dorn, under the lead of the Great Deceiver, Satan. The Inquisitor lost hope that human suffering can, through faith in Christ, be subsumed and given meaning through the cross, the sign in history that cannot be eliminated. This is the ultimate “connection” and hope that Percy pointed to in his evocation of the Mass of the Epiphany at the end of the novel. A cautionary hope, to be sure, so he concludes the novel with a humbled Tom More back in the world—pursuing his vocation of helping others, as he again counsels Mickey LaFaye, through language, in her struggle to connect with her past and rediscover her truly human self.

278 

Walker Percy

Epilogue Epilogue

Epilogue Beyond Suicide

The title of my study, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Walker Percy and the Age of Suicide, raises the larger question of whether there is any hope for a civilization that seems to be headed toward some final, apocalyptic end. It would appear that the major works of both writers are so marked by pessimism that a fatalistic response is the only possible one to the question of hope. However, we do well to remember Flannery’s O’Connor’s pithy response to the question about the so-called pessimism of twentieth-century writers. She said people without hope don’t write books. Her statement was another way of making the point Percy made in his essay “The Man on the Train” when he argued that the very act of writing—of truthfully naming society’s spiritual ills—was itself an artistic reversal of the debilitating malaise. Both Dostoevsky and Percy were “namers” of our diminished modern predicament as human beings. But the question remains: what signs and what tangible grounds for hope can be found in the works of both writers? To respond to this question, I want to explore it from two interrelated perspectives, one historical and theological and the second existential and ethical.

6 Throughout this study I have examined the opposition both writers developed between what Charles Taylor called “exclusive secular humanism” and its offshoots (positivism, scientism, autonomous individualism, nihilism) and the Christian faith. As stark as the opposition is often presented in their works, both Dostoevsky and Percy knew, of course, that the actual historical relationship between the Christian faith and secular reason, science and humanism is far more complicated and nuanced. Both were Christian

279

believers, but neither author was opposed to the development of reason, genuine science, or social progress. That said, as satirists and prophetic writers, both were deeply critical of and alarmed by the destructive effects of secular “progress” on the spiritual self (the soul) of individual human beings and on personal freedom. Philosopher Charles Taylor made the case for a more complex understanding of the relationship between exclusive secular humanism and Christianity. Against any oversimplified dichotomy, he argued that “in modern secularist culture there are mingled together both authentic developments of the gospel, of an incarnational mode of life, and also a closing off to God that negates the Gospel.” 1 To elaborate this point, Taylor begins by making the important distinction between the Christian faith per se and “the project of Christendom: the attempt to marry the faith with a form of culture and mode of society.” 2 As it developed over time, secular humanism broke from and opposed the culture of Christendom. Nevertheless, he maintains that this “breakout was a necessary condition in the development” of our modern socioreligious culture. Taylor points out that, to its credit, secular humanism opened the door to an increased emphasis on individual rights, freedom of conscience, and universal justice, values wholly compatible with authentic Christianity and ethics. On the one hand, the accelerating development of humanistic values on the sociopolitical level “made possible what we now recognize as a great advance in the practical penetration of the gospel in human life.” 3 On the other hand, exclusive secular humanism came to oppose not only the constraining culture of Christendom, but also Christianity itself. It claimed its exclusive ability to fulfill human potential and aspirations, and in so doing closed the door to the transcendent, denying the individual’s radical and primary relationship to God. It admitted no valid claim to a transcendent order beyond the empirical world. In promoting the expansion of greater human freedom and material progress, it came to “accredit the view that human life is better off without transcendent vision altogether.” 1. Charles Taylor, “A Catholic Modernity?,” in A Catholic Modernity, ed., introduction James L. Heft (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 16. 2. Ibid., 17. 3. Ibid., 18.

280 

Epilogue

To Taylor, this climate now greatly pervades advanced modern societies.4 However, Christian believers insist that we are not just earthly human beings and that earthly life “isn’t the whole story.” Neither are we just rational/animal creatures. Our deepest aspirations reach beyond this life because we are essentially religious beings whose ultimate fulfillment is beyond this world. “The point of things,” Taylor says, “isn’t exhausted by life, the fullness of life, even the goodness of life.” 5 This is especially evident in secular humanism’s inability to deal with suffering and death. This inability reveals secular humanism’s fatal flaw: that it cannot account for or give meaning to human perversity, violence, and radical evil. Dostoevsky demonstrated this in Demons, as did Percy in Lancelot. Secular humanism’s failure in this regard has provoked conflicting reactions. One reaction has been an effort, largely futile, on the part of some believers to return to the doctrinaire, authoritarian order of traditional Christendom. But the genie of secular humanism is out of the bottle and cannot be returned. Another reaction, as Taylor shows, has been a revolt against both genuine Christianity and secular humanism itself and the values they share—a revolt typified by Nietzsche.6 Nietzsche’s anti-humanism both scoffs at belief in the transcendent and at the idea of homo religious. Instead, he embraces suffering as a path to “self-overcoming,” personal autonomy, and power. His view can be seen in the “autonomous man” ideology of the suicide Kirilov in Demons. This view also implicitly reveals the kind of hatred of ordinary humanity we saw in the Grand Inquisitor and in Lance Lamar, a hatred that is generated, paradoxically, by the disappointment over repeated failure of secular humanism’s aspirations to achieve its utopian goals. Frustration over this failure and contempt for ordinary humanity open the door to fascism of the kind represented by the Grand Inquisitor’s and Lance Lamar’s plans for society. As the nihilist Shigalov says in Demons, “Starting from unlimited freedom, I arrive at unlimited despotism.” 7 It is also represented more concretely by the proliferation of acts of sexual violence, pornography, and suicide. 4. Ibid., 19, 24. 5. Ibid., 20. 6. Ibid., 24. 7. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, introduction Joseph Frank (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), 402.

 

Epilogue 

281

Given his interpretation of the complex relationship between modern secular humanism and Christianity, Taylor suggests that we are living through an “interregnum” time that is fraught with possibilities both dire and potentially life-renewing. The times have rightfully been called “apocalyptic” in this sense, a time of “endings” and “beginnings,” of possible disaster and of hope. For his part, anthropologist and cultural/literary critic Rene Girard interpreted this present “interregnum” in scriptural terms as a “time of Gentiles” (Lk 21).8 Like Taylor, Girard’s view of the relationship between enlightened secular humanism and Christianity is complex and nuanced. On the one hand, he also affirms that secular humanism promoted the Christian values of personal freedom and the integrity and dignity of the individual, especially through its emphasis on “the concern for victims.” 9 On the other hand, he argues that secular humanism promoted a neo-pagan ideology that, denying the transcendent, affirmed man’s exclusive autonomy and power to shape its own destiny. We have witnessed this hubris, of course, in the disastrous events of the past two centuries. For both Taylor and Girard, despite its aspirations and good deeds, secular humanism has proved impotent against the human penchant for violence, rivalry, despair, and death—mankind’s demonic attraction to “thanatos.” But Girard also faults Christianity for its failures—the failures of many generations of nominal Christians—to live up to the gospel message, a failure that makes it profoundly implicated in the many horrors of the twentieth century, in two World Wars and the Holocaust. Girard’s description of the interregnum period we now are living through as a “time of the Gentiles” seems particularly close to Percy’s thought near the end of The Thanatos Syndrome. Looking retrospectively, I think we can also see it as applicable to Dostoevsky’s major novels. Girard understands the “time of the Gentiles” as a period in which God has, as it were, withdrawn his providential hand from history and allowed men to run human affairs on their own. The results have generally been catastrophic, with constant cycles of violence and social, political, and moral 8. Rene Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoit Chantre, trans. Mary Baker (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012), 109–10. I am especially indebted to chap. 5, “Holderlin’s Sorrow,” 109–35. 9. Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis); see chaps. 13 and 14.

282 

Epilogue

upheaval. Continuation of these cycles would seem to point toward eventual global disaster, as prophesied in the book of Revelation. However, Girard argues that this apocalyptic cycle must be understood in terms of a broader and deeper pattern of historical events—that is, in terms of the revelation of Christ’s kingdom as having already been established in history by his incarnation, death, and resurrection.10 Girard’s theme of the two cycles of history seems especially applicable to the conclusion of The Thanatos Syndrome, when Fr. Smith tells Tom More of the apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary to three children at Medjugorge. In her apparition, Mary tells the children that God has allowed the “Great Prince Satan” to rule the world for a hundred years, the twentieth century. This can be seen as an equivalent to Girard’s reading of a “time of the Gentiles.” The disasters that followed God’s “withdrawal” were mankind’s own doing. “All he (God) had to do was leave us alone,” Fr. Smith says. “We did it. Reason warred with faith. Science triumphed. The upshot? One hundred million dead.” 11 The priest interprets these historical events in terms of the apocalyptic cycle named by Girard. But despite this grim history, Fr. Smith also sees in Mary’s message a sign of the larger redemptive cycle of the Kingdom of God, and of hope. “One must not lose hope,” he affirms, “even though the final war seems inevitable as this terrible century comes to a close.” As he tells More, “Mary tells the children that if they “keep a loving heart and not secretly wish for the death of others, the Great Prince Satan will not succeed in destroying the world.” Smith acknowledges that perhaps “the world will end in fire and the Lord will come—it is not for us to say.” 12 What it is for humans to say is “whether hope and faith will come back into the world?” His words echo Jesus’s question to his followers when he asked if when the Son of Man returns, will he “find faith on earth?” (Lk 18:6). In the meantime, believers are expected to “watch and wait”—and work for the fulfillment of the Kingdom. My second perspective on the question of hope is existential and ethical. It focuses on the state of the “survivors” in the modern spiritual pre10. Girard, Battling to the End, 110–16. 11. Walker Percy, The Thanatos Syndrome (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987), 365. 12. Ibid., 365.

 

Epilogue 

283

dicament and on what is to be done in the interregnum “time of the Gentiles.” Charles Taylor insisted that to live spiritually in such a time requires a change of identity, “a radical de-centering of the self, in relation with God.” 13 Another way of saying this is that it requires an overcoming of the autonomous, egoistic consciousness and self-will we have seen throughout both Dostoevsky’s and Percy’s novels. James Alison describes this radical decentering of the self under God as a displacing of an apocalyptic consciousness in favor of the eschatological consciousness of Christ. For him, the latter is rooted in Christ’s establishment of the Kingdom of God that is present here and now and that is the guarantor of hope.14 It is a way of overcoming what Percy saw as the “deformed consciousness” of the modern secular mind. To move from an apocalyptic to an eschatological mode of thought and action necessarily involves suffering and self-emptying, the metanoia prescribed by Christ. This transformation of the self, informed by a “new” Christ-like consciousness, demands at the same time a change in our relations with others—commitment to an ethic of action rooted in faith, caritas, mercy, and the care of others. The theme of the “man of action” that we saw as so troubling to the underground man, Raskolnikov, Stavrogin, Alyosha, Binx Bolling, Will Barrett, Alison Huger, Sr. Johnette Vianney, and Tom More is transformed into the self who becomes a “man for others.” This is the mode of action we see exemplified in Sonya Marmaledov, Porfiry, Bishop Tikhon, the monk Zosima, Alyosha, Binx Bolling, the elder Will Barrett and Alison Huger, Sister Johnette, Father John, Father Boomer, and Father Smith. These exempla embrace the elder Zosima’s insight that “all are guilty” and “all are responsible for all.” To adopt this mode of self-conscious self-giving is to overcome the condition of despair and suicide and become thereby one of Percy’s “ex-suicides,” a survivor and wayfarer living in love, charity, and hope with other wayfarers through the dark times. 13. Taylor, “A Catholic Modernity?,” 21. 14. James Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong, foreword by Sebastian Moore (New York: Crossroad, 1998), 212–29.

284 

Epilogue

Selected Bibliography Selected Bibliography

Selected Bibliography

Fyodor Dostoevsky Works Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. Translated, with an introduction by David Magarshack. New York: Penguin, 1951. ———. The Notebooks for “The Idiot.” Edited, with an introduction by Edward Wasiolek. Translated by Katherine Strelsky. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1967. ———. Winter Notes on Summer Impressions. Translated by David Patterson. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988. ———. Notes from Underground. Translated and edited by Michael R. Katz. New York: W. W. Norton, 1989. ———. The Brothers Karamazov. Translated and annotated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990. ———. A Writer’s Diary. Translated and annotated by Kenneth Lantz. Introductory Study by Gary Saul Morson. 2 vols. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993–94. ———. Dostoevsky’s Occasional Writings. Translated, with an introduction by David Magarshack. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1997. ———. Demons. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Introduction by Joseph Frank. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. ———. The Idiot. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Introduction by Richard Pevear. New York: Vintage, 2003.

Selected Criticism Alvarez, A. The Savage God: A Study of Suicide. New York: Random House, 1970. Amoia, Alba. Fyodor Dostoevsky. New York: Continuum, 1993. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems in Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Edited and translated by

285

Caryl Emerson, introduction by Wayne C. Booth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Busch, R. L. Humor in the Major Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1987. Cassady, Steven. Dostoevsky’s Religion. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005. De Jonge, Alex. Dostoevsky and the Age of Intensity. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975. Dirscherl, Denis, SJ. Dostoevsky and the Catholic Church. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1986. Evdokimov, Paul. Dostoevski et le probleme du mal. Paris: Desclee du Brouwer, 1961, 1984. Originally published in 1942. Frank, Joseph. Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002. ———. Dostoevsky: The Middle Years (1871–1881). Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002. ———. Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time. Edited by Mary Petrusewicz. Princeton, N.J., and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010. ———. “Notes from Underground.” In Notes from Underground, translated and edited by Michael R. Katz. New York: W. W. Norton, 1989. Fusso, Susan. “Dostoevsky and the Family.” In Leatherbarrow, A Cambridge Companion to Fyodor Dostoevsky, 175–91. 1981. Goldstein, David I. Dostoevsky and the Jews. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Holquist, Michael. “The Gaps in Christology: The Idiot.” In Jackson, Dostoevsky: New Perspectives, 126–45. 1984. Jackson, Robert L., ed. Dostoevsky: New Perspectives. Englewood, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1984. Jones, Malcolm J. “Fyodor Dostoevsky and Religion.” In Leatherbarrow, A Cambridge Companion to Fyodor Dostoevsky, 148–75. 1981. Knapp, Lisa, ed. Dostoevsky’s The Idiot: A Critical Companion. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998. Leatherbarrow, William J. Dostoevsky. Boston: Twayne, 1981. ———, ed. Dostoevsky’s The Devils: A Critical Companion. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1999. ———, ed. A Cambridge Companion to Fyodor Dostoevsky. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Menut, A. D. Dostoevsky and Existentialism. Lawrence, Kans.: Coronado, 1972. Murav, Harriet. Holy Foolishness: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Novels; The Poetics of Cultural Critique. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992. Payne, Robert. Dostoevsky: A Human Portrait. New York: Knopf, 1961. Santos, Ellis. Political Apocalypse: A Study of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. 2nd rev. ed. Wilmington, Del.: ISI, 2000.

286 

Selected Bibliography

Simmons, Ernest J. Dostoevsky: The Making of a Novelist. London: Oxford University Press, 1940. Terras, Victor. The Idiot: An Interpretation. Boston: Twayne, 1990. ———. Reading Dostoevsky. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. Ward, Bruce K. Dostoevsky’s Critique of the West: The Quest for the Earthly Paradise. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfred Laurier, 1986. Wasiolek, Edward. Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1964. Williams, Rowan. Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction. Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2008. Yarmolinsky, Avrahm. Fyodor Dostoevsky: His Life in Art. New York: Grove, 1957.

Walker Percy Works Percy, Walker. The Moviegoer. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961. ———. The Last Gentleman. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966. ———. Love in the Ruins. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971. ———. The Message in the Bottle. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975. ———. Lancelot. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. ———. The Second Coming. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980. ———. Lost in the Cosmos. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983. ———. The Thanatos Syndrome. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987. ———. Signposts in a Strange Land. Edited with an introduction by Patrick Samway. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991. Percy, Walker, and Kenneth Laine Ketner. A Thief of Peirce: The Letters of Kenneth Laine Ketner and Walker Percy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995.

Selected Criticism Bloom, Harold, ed. Walker Percy. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Brooks, Cleanth. “Walker Percy and Modern Gnosticism.” Southern Review, no. 13 (Autumn 1979): 677–87. Ciuba, Gary. Walker Percy: Books of Revelations. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991. Desmond, John F. At the Crossroads: Ethical and Religious Themes in the Writings of Walker Percy. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1997. ———. Walker Percy’s Search for Community. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004. ———. “Fyodor Dostoevsky, Walker Percy and the Demoniac Self.” Southern Literary Review (Spring 2012): 88–108.

 

Selected Bibliography 

287

Dupuy, Edward. Autobiography in Walker Percy: Repetition, Recovery, and Redemption. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996. Kobre, Michael. Walker Percy’s Voices. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000. Lawson, Lewis A. Following Percy. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1988. ———. Still Following Percy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996. Lawson, Lewis A., and Victor A. Kramer, eds. Conversations with Walker Percy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985. ———. More Conversations with Walker Percy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. Luschei, Martin. The Sovereign Wayfarer: Walker Percy’s Diagnosis of the Malaise. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972. O’Gorman, Farrell. Peculiar Crossroads: Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and the Catholic Vision in Postwar Southern Fiction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004. Prigden, Allen. Walker Percy’s Sacramental Landscapes. Selingrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 2000. Quinlan, Kieran. Walker Percy: The Last Catholic Novelist. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1996. Rudnicki, Robert N. Percyscapes: The Fugue State in Twentieth-Century Fiction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999. Samway, Patrick, SJ. Walker Percy: A Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997. Tolson, Jay. Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992. ———. The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy. Edited by Jay Tolson. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. The House of Percy: Honor, Melancholy and Imagination in a Southern Family. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Other Works Consulted Alison, James. The Joy of Being Wrong. Foreword by Sebastian Moore. New York: Crossroad, 1998. Camus, Albert. The Plague. Translated from the French by Stuart Gilbert. New York: Modern Library, 1948. ———. The Fall. Translated by Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage, 1956. ———. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Translated by Justin O’Brien. New York: Random House Vintage, 1959. Emmanuel, Steven M. Kierkegaard and the Concept of Revelation. Albany: SUNY Press, 1996. Evans, C. Stephen. Kierkegaard: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

288 

Selected Bibliography

Freud, Sigmund. “Thoughts for the Times of War and Death.” In Freud: On War, Sex and Neurosis, 245–76. New York: Arts and Science Press, 1947. Guardini, Romano. “Dostoevsky’s Idiot: A Symbol of Christ.” Crosscurrents 6 (1956): 359–82. ———. The End of the Modern World. Translated by Joseph Theman and Herbert Burke. Edited, with an introduction by Frederick D. Wilhelmsen. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1968. Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. New York: Vintage, 1984. Fowler, Doreen A. “Answers and Ambiguity in Percy’s The Second Coming.” In Walker Percy, edited, with an introduction by Harold Bloom, 115–25. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Girard, Rene. Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and the Other in Literary Structure. Translated by Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965. ———. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2001. ———. Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoit Chantre. Translated by Mary Baker. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012. ———. Resurrection from the Underground. Edited and translated by James G. Williams. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012. Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death. Translated with an introduction by Walter Lowrie. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955. Originally published in 1941. ———. “The Difference between a Genius and an Apostle.” In Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vol, 2, F–K, edited and translated by Harold V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Assisted by Gregor Malantschuk. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press. 1970. ———. Works of Love. Edited, with an introduction and notes by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995. Lewis, R. W. B. The Picaresque Saint: Representative Figures in Contemporary Literature. Philadelphia and New York: J. P. Lippincott, 1958. Originally published in 1956. Lohfink, Gerhard. No Irrelevant Jesus. Translated by Linda M. Mahoney. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2014. Madden, David. Rediscoveries. New York: Crown, 1971. Marcel, Gabriel. Man in Mass Society. Translated by G. S. Fraser. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1962. Originally published in 1952. Miller, Walter M., Jr. A Canticle for Liebowitz. Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1959. O’Connor, Flannery. Collected Works. New York: Library of America, 1988. Simpson, Lewis P. Imagining Our Time: Recollections and Reflections on American Writing. With an introduction by Fred Hobson. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007.

 

Selected Bibliography 

289

Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Self? Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989. ———. “A Catholic Modernity.” In A Catholic Modernity, edited, with an introduction by James L. Heft, SM, 13–37. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Voegelin, Eric. “The Origins of Scientism.” In Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 10, Published Essays 1940–1952, edited, with an introduction by Ellis Santos, 168–97. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2000. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Introduction by Anthony Giddens. Translated by Talcott Parsons. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1958. Wills, Garry. St. Augustine. New York: Viking/Penguin, 1999.

290 

Selected Bibliography

Index

Index

Index

aesthetic damnation, 186 alienation, 35, 37, 223 Alison, James, 36, 237, 246, 277, 284 Alvarez, A. A.: and suicide, 142 angelism: and bestialism, 251 Anna: as New Eve, 207; as new woman, 216 anonymity, 172–73 ant-hill society, 30–31, 51, 63, 127, 255 Apocalypse: 102, 221–24; of the age, 275; in American society, 250; in consciousness, 226; as demoniac, 146; as dream, 65; and eschatology, 221–24; and suicide, 230; as vision, 116 atheism, 25, 85; and Catholic Church, 104; in 1840s Russia, 46 Augustine, St., 11, 43, 85, 166, 177 authority, 177; figure of, 32, 91–92, 244; of God, 177; and idols, 32; and Will Barrett, 93, 245 autonomous man: and exclusive reason, 30; and Kierkegaard, 123; and Kirilov, 35; and man-god, 79; as mind, 35, 111, 116; and Nietzsche, 281; and new man, 102; and Percy, 71; and Raskolnikov, 64; and reason, 30, 36; as self, 6, 20, 23, 98; and Stavrogin, 111; and Svidrigalov, 67. See also self autonomy, 9; and individualism, 62, 251

baptism: of Jamie Vaught, 186, 195 Barrett, Edward: general discussion, 176–95, 221–47; and suicide, 188, 194, 226–28 Barrett, Will, 176, 187, 221, 233–34; general discussion, 176–95, 221–47 beauty: and Binx Bolling, 168–69; as ideal, 73; and Ippolit, 89; and Prince Myshkin, 80 behaviorism, 269, 273 Bolling, Binx, 154–75, 178; general discussion, 154–75 Camus, Albert, 3, 103, 142, 154–55; The Fall, 3; The Myth of Sisyphus, 103, 143, 147, 157; The Plague, 3, 120; and suicide, 122, 124 caritas: and Augustine, 85; in The Brothers Karamazov, 118,135; in The Idiot, 83; in Kierkegaard, 131, 135; in Notes from Underground, 56; in The Second Coming, 241 Cartesian dualism: and consciousness, 33–34; and horizontal/vertical search, 163; and religious-ethical split, 95; and Tocqueville, 37 castaway: and Binx Bolling, 162; and Prince Myshkin, 75–77; and Stavrogin, 104; and Will Barrett, 91 Catholic Church: condemned by Dostoevsky/Prince Myshkin, 85;

291

Catholic Church (cont.) condemned by Grand Inquisitor, 127; condemned by Lance Lamar, 213; in Love in the Ruins, 249 Century of Progress exhibition, 51, 172 Chernyshevsky, Nickolay, 43, 47 child molestation, 81. See also sexuality Christianity, 4; and Christian faith, 279–80, 283 Ciuba, Gary, 235, 248 Clauswitz, Claude von: on the duel, 159 conscience: and consciousness, 38; and free will, 48; and Lebedev, 88; in Notes from Underground, 43; and Sonya Marmeladov, 62; in Stavrogin, 100, 102 consciousness, 20–21, 33, 144; apocalypse in, 225, 233, 237–38; autonomous, 212, 219; deformation of 34, 209, 250, 262; as eschatological, 284; as new, 21, 39, 50, 130, 144, 215, 223–24; as old, 22–23; postmodern, 92, 179; as self, 35, 38, 123, 189; and suffering, 145 consumerism, 106 crime: and no crime, 127 Crystal Palace: 50–51, 97; and Fedville, 253, 264; in The Moviegoer, 173 Cutrer, Emily, 158–59; and despair, 162; general discussion, 154–75 Cutrer, Kate, 154; and fatalism, 162; general discussion, 154–75; and sex, 169; and suicide, 158 Darwin, Charles, 18; and Darwinism, 47–48 dehumanization: and ant-hill society, 51 demonic force, 98–99, 148; as demoniac self, 6, 71, 98, 100, 146; and possession, 71, 152; as principle, 106; demons, 97; and demonism, 112

292 

Index

Descartes, René: and autonomous self, 9; and dualism, 33–34; and shabby devil, 129, 209–10 Desmond, John, 9 despair: and Christ, 42–44; in Girard, 9; and hope, 66; in The Idiot, 84; in Kierkegaard, 6, 123; and Lance Lamar, 200; and naming, 222; and ordeal, 50; and the search, 166; in Stavrogin, 99; and suicide, 154; and Sutter Vaught, 189–92; in Svidrigalov, 70; and transformation of, 24; and underground man, 47 determinism: and Christ, 50; Dostoevsky’s attack on, 43, 47, 55–57; and laws of nature, 28, 47–49 divine Logos, 4; as ontic, 11 Dostoevsky, Fyodor: 1, 4; The Brothers Karamazov, 117–38; Crime and Punishment, 57–73; Demons, 97–115; Diary of a Writer, 142–46; The Gambler, 73; The House of the Dead, 15; The Idiot, 73–95; Notes from Underground, 40–56; Poor Folks, 15; road to suicide, 27–40 dualism, 9, 46; as Cartesian, 53 duel: as sexual, 217–18; and underground man, 52–53 Eliot, Thomas Sterns, 161, 172 Enlightenment: Percy’s critique of, 250–51; and suicide, 4; and underground man, 44, 48; in the West, 18 eros, 111; as desire, 67–71, 82; as erotic relations, 70, 71, 81, 120; as erotic spirit, 71–72; as love, 132; and responsibility, 71 eschatology, 76; in consciousness, 77–78; as perspective, 223–24, 237–38; as vision, 76 esthetic mode: in Kierkegaard, 92

ethics, 75; and action, 85; and choice, 76–78; ethical mode, 92–93 euthanasia: and Fedville doctors, 60, 97–98; in Love in the Ruins, 256; in The Thanatos Syndrome, 259, 264, 266, 272 Evdocimov, Paul, 70 evil, 75, 128. See also sin exclusive secular humanism: in Taylor, 279–82; and secular rationalism, 31 ex-suicide, 284 faith: in Christ, 50–51; as Christian, 66, 68, 89, 117–18, 220; in Kierkegaard, 208, 212; knight of, 92; leap of, 7, 119, 123, 156; of Lonnie Smith; 156, 164; loss of, 88; and reason, 94; refusal of, 6; in Russia, 83; of Shatov, 115; and Stavrogin, 115; and suicide, 28; and Tikhon, 110; and underground man, 41, 56 fascism, 281 fatalism: of autonomous self, 156; in Notes from Underground, 47; in paganism, 171; and stoicism, 159 Father Boomer, 177, 195 Father John: general discussion, 196–220 Father Weatherbee, 244 Faulkner, William, 2; The Sound and the Fury, 140–41 Fedville, 60, 248–49, 253–54; general discussion, 248–78; as Tower of Babel, 269 forgiveness: of Jesus, 121–22 Frank, Joseph, 1, 38; on epilogue to Demons, 109; on faith and reason, 94; on Ivan Karamazov, 119; on Kierkegaard, 84, 155; on Notes from Underground, 41, 44, 108; on Prince Myshkin, 76–78, 82 freedom: and despotism, 281; and erosion of faith, 88; in Kierkegaard, 123;

loss 259, 261, 266, 277; as romantic, 158, 160–61; and scientism, 149; and the self, 5; as self-gratification, 205, 216; and sentimentality, 86; and slavery, 204; sovereignty, 38–39; as spiritual, 126, 128; as violated, 265 free will, 19; vs. determinism, 48–49; and Dostoevsky, 31; and Grand Inquisitor, 126; vs. laws of nature, 28; and Lebedev, 88; and Percy on sin, 150; and utilitarianism, 61; in utopianism, 97 Freud, Sigmund, 34, 37, 153 Girard, Rene, 4; and belief in Satan, 88–89; on caricature Christianity, 253; on concern for victims, 123; on the duel, 159; on hominization, 273; on Kirilov, l02–3; on mimetic desire, 7–8, 201; on Prince Myshkin, 79; on secular humanism and totalitarianism, 229; and “time of the Gentiles”, 282–83 God: and Binx Bolling, 165–67, 171. See also Jesus Christ good news, 93, 146–49 Grand Inquisitor, 126–27; and Lance Lamar, 196, 205; as mock savior, 268; and Satan, 127–28; and Tower of Babel, 127, 263, 266 great man theory of personality, 59 Greene, Graham: The Heart of the Matter, 120 Guardini, Romano: and beauty, 80; on Christ, 79; and end of modern world, 212, 221, 240; on Prince Myshkin, 76 Heidegger, Martin, 155 Herzen, Alexander, 27 Holbein, Hans, the Younger, 83, 89, 239 Holquist, Michael, 108

 

Index 

293

Holy Eucharist: in Catholic mass, 277; and Lonnie Smith, 164; parody of, 211; and Samantha More, 257; and Tom More, 249 Holy Spirit: in Kierkegaard, 44; and Pentecost, 267; and transformed life, 24 honor: and dishonor, 206; and the duel, 52; and Emily Cutrer, 173; as lost 217; in Southern code, 140–41; and Will Barrett, 180–81, 184 hope: in Alison Huger, 238; and apocalypse, 274–75; and Christocentric vision, 235; in Percy, 36; and Shatov, 115; in Taylor, 13 Huger, Allison, 230–32, 235–36, 238–40; general discussion, 221–47 hyper-consciousness: and suffering, 49; in underground man, 41, 44, 46, 49 idealism: as ideology 44; as warped, 57 Immelmann, Art, 256; general discussion, 248–78; as Satan, 256 individualism, 9, 11, 103, 149 innocence, 68–69, 81–82, 199; of children, 214; ideal of, 217; loss of, 205, 212 intersubjective relationship: in Percy, 164 isolation: and alienation, 223; and Alison Huger, 232; and dualism, 34; as spiritual, 9 Jacoby, Janos, 218; general discussion, 196–220 Jesus Christ, 127, 164, 209, 253, 284; and mock Christ, 254; and new life, 232; resurrection of, 224, 239, 241; as Word, 264. See also God Jews: and Binx Bolling, 42, 165; and Christ, 245; and ontological mystery,

294 

Index

277; and secular humanism, 228; as sign, 263; and Will Barrett, 220, 226 Kafka, Franz, 99 Karamazov, Alexei (Alyosha): and Christ, 129; general discussion, 117–35; and reason vs. faith debate, 118–19 Karamazov, Dmitri, 118; and new consciousness, 133–35 Karamazov, Ivan: and innocent children, 199; isolation of, 129–30, 133–35; and Lance Lamar, 196–97; and reason vs. faith debate, 118–19; and shabby devil, 129 Kierkegaard, Søren: and autonomous man, 79; and despair in Lance Lamar, 197; and despair in underground man, 42; and erotic spirit, 71; and ethical mode, 186; on faith vs. reason, 84; and freedom under God, 125; on Ivan Karamazov’s despair, 122; in The Moviegoer, 154–55; religious mode of, 170, 176; on selfhood and despair, 6; on sin, 171, 207; on sin and repentance, 44; and Stavrogin as “non-self”, 99, 110 Kirilov, 101; on freedom and suicide, 101–2, 157; on man-god, 182–83 knowledge of faith: compared to scientific knowledge, 94 Lamar, Lancelot: and autonomous consciousness, 219; as child molester, 196; claim to freedom, 204–5; and demonic possession, 202; and honor/ dishonor, 206–7; and innocence of children, 214; and Ivan Karamazov, 189; as narrator, 198; on New Woman and new life, 215; as pornographer, 197; as rationalist, 201, 203, 217; and

search for sin, 207–9, 218; sexual theory of history, 211, 216; and stoic values, 213, 216, 218 Lamar, Margot, 201; as lady/whore, 211 language, 264; as authentic, 239; as corrupted, 260, 262, 265; as divine Word, 255, 258; and freedom, 193; and naming, 232, 242 laws of nature, 19; and Christian mystery, 30; and determinism, 55; and deterministic new consciousness, 145; and great man theory, 59; and Holbein’s portrait of dead Christ, 83; and Ippolit, 89; and scientism, 149; and suffering, 234 leap of faith: in Kierkegaard, 74; and scientism, 32; and Will Barrett, 92. See also faith liberalism: and atheism, 97; and humanitarian ideology, 265; and nihilism, 97; in Western culture, 96, 99 love: in The Moviegoer, 164. See also eros Luschei, Martin, 154, 169 malaise, 3; in The Moviegoer, 158; postmodern sexual, 168–70 man of action: and Doctor Bolling, 162; and Lance Lamar, 203–4; and Raskolnikov, 60; and reclaiming honor, 207; and underground man, 45, 50–53 Manicheanism: in Grand Inquisitor, 126; and Ivan Karamazov, 121 Marcel, Gabriel, 155, 176 materialism: Dostoevsky critique of, 27–28, 30; as ideology, 18; and prosperity, 185; and secular-utilitarian ideology, 87 Merton, Thomas, 1 metaphysical: order, 60, 65, 157; as rebel, 57–58, 142; view of human nature, 5, 151

Montaigne, Michel de, 188 moral sensuality: in Stavrogin, 110, 113 More, Ellen (Oglethorpe), 148, 252, 262, 274; general discussion, 248–78 More, Samantha, 257 More, Thomas: and Art Immelmann, 256; as bad Catholic, 249; on collapse of America, 250–51; confusion about Blue Boy project, 271; defeat of Blue Boy project, 271–72; despair of, 256; as diagnostician of the age, 259, 262, 274–76; dispute with Van Dorn, 265– 66; and the Eucharist, 257; friendship with Rinaldo Smith, 269; general discussion, 248–78; on language, 256; loss of language/freedom, 261–62; as mock-savior, 253; and the sacraments, 258; on the self, 251; and split between ethical and religious, 252 More, Thomas, St., 249, 252 mystery, 5; and Binx Bolling, 161, 164; of Christ’s Incarnation, 209; of grace, 237; of “here and now”, 165; and Ivan Karamazov, 119; and Lance Lamar, 201; and laws of nature, 47; ontological, 5; and rationalism, 233, 235; of Raine Robinette, 217; and scientism, 33; and Sr. Johnette Vianney’s faith, 192–93 Nazism, 18, 32; and John Van Dorn, 265; and Rinaldo Smith, 271–72 negative theology, 71 new anthropology: and Percy, 10 new consciousness, 49; and suffering, 50. See also consciousness new ideology: and Dostoevsky, 29–30, 58–59, 61; and Raskolnikov, 65–66; and traditional Christianity, 38 new man: as autonomous, 35; as man– god, 102; and St. Paul, 21, 24, 244

 

Index 

295

New Order of Society: as Gnostic paradise, 212; and Lance Lamar, 205 new woman, 55, 63; Allison Huger, general discussion, 221–27; Anna, general discussion, 196–220; in Lancelot, 211; in The Second Coming, 230–31 Nietzsche, Frederick, 143, 281 nihilism: and demons, 96–98; and despotism, 281; and freedom, 204–5; of Ippolit, 89; of Kirilov, 35, 104; and new ideology, 18; in nineteenthcentury Russia, 2; and suicide, 90 nominalism: crisis in language, 34 O’Connor, Flannery, 5, 84–86, 150, 217, 271; and sentimentality, 123–24; and The Violent Bear It Away, 120 objective scientific disaster: in Percy, 168 ontic Logos: and good news, 255 ontological deprivation: and Percy, 37, 44, 144; as sickness, 3, 44 ordeal: and hope, 152; and new consciousness 144, 149. See also suffering Orthodox Russian Christianity: 19; and faith in Christ, 115; faith of ordinary Russians, 96, 99 paganism: and despair in Kierkegaard, 156, 171; in Emily Cutrer, 159; as ethical standard, 159, 171 Pascal, Blaise, 166, 232 Paul, St.: of natural man, 170; of new man, 21, 145; and old consciousness, 23–24; and salvation from the Jews, 244–45; and Tom More, 252–53; and Will Barrett, 224–36 pedophilia, 262, 269, 272. See also child molestation Peirce, Charles Sanders, 4, 7, 9, 41 Pentecost: and Holy Spirit, 267

296 

Index

Percy, Walker, 1–24; age of suicide, 139–53; “Diagnosing the Modern Malaise”, 37, 98, 261; Lancelot, 196–220; The Last Gentleman, 176–95; “Loss of the Creature”, 98; Lost in the Cosmos, 50, 59, 64, 67, 69–70, 71, 145–46, 147, 152, 167; Love in the Ruins, 248–58; “The Message in the Bottle”, 245; The Moviegoer, 154–75; The Second Coming, 221–47; The Thanatos Syndrome, 259–78 pity: in Prince Myshkin, 74, 80–81, 84; and self-pity, 89; in Svidrigalov, 68 pornography: and Lance Lamar, 203; in Lost in the Cosmos, 147; and Stavrogin, 112; and Sutter Vaught, 190; in The Thanatos Syndrome, 17 possibility: of Will Barrett, 182 predicament: and Binx Bolling, 157; and hopelessness, 47; of modern self, 2, 15, 31; in The Moviegoer, 154–55; and Prince Myshkin, 76; of Raskolnikov, 66; and sexuality-suicide, 190; as spiritual, 4; of Stavrogin, 99; and suicide, 21–22, 34; of underground man, 40, 44; of Will Barrett, 176, 181 Prince Myshkin: general discussion, 73–95; and Will Barrett, 179–80 quest: as religious, 179–80; as romantic, 184 rationalism, 18, 90; and rational egoism, 44, 63; and rationalist ideology, 43, 49, 57, 59, 67, 200 reason and science ideology, 28, 31, 44; and age of suicide, 259; and Binx Bolling, 163; and Century of Progress, 173; of Fedville, 269; of Fedville doctors, 60; and fractured self, 71; and hyper-consciousness, 46; and Ivan Karamazov, 119; and Lance Lamar,

201; in The Moviegoer, 156; in Percy, 145; and sexuality, 147; and suffering, 130, 132; in underground man, 48, 254–55; and Will Barrett, 178. See also scientism rebellion: as metaphysical, 154, 156; as romantic, 163 redemption: by Christ, 122; and Flannery O’Connor, 124; and redemptive love, 132; of woman, 211 Release of the Destruction of Life without Value (Hoche and Binding), 271 religious mode, 74, 92; as belief, 85; as feeling, 84. See also Kierkegaard resurrection: of the body, 175; of Christ, 8, 21, 76, 122; of Lazarus, 63; parody of, 204; parody of new life in Lance Lamar, 212 Revelation, book of, 78, 87, 94; in Dostoevsky, 224–26; in Love in the Ruins, 257; in The Second Coming, 235; in The Thanatos Syndrome, 276 Robinette, Raine, 217–18; general discussion, 196–220 Roman Catholicism: condemned by Dostoevsky, 18. See also Catholic Church romantic heroism: in Binx Bolling, 160; as ideology, 74; in Raskolnikov, 58; in underground man, 45, 52 romantic idealism, 99; as fantasy of Svidrigalov, 67–68 romanticism: and Binx Bolling, 162–63; Dostoevsky’s parody of, 43; and Germany, 265; and nostalgia, 185; as quest, 165; as sentimental, 189; and Will Barrett, 180 romantic self: and Dostoevsky’s idealism, 78; as false Christ, 79; in Prince Myshkin, 77; and Will Barrett, 92 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 46 Russian Orthodox faith: and Christ, 85

sacrament, 17–18; and baptism, 186; in Love in the Ruins, 257; and Percy, 151, 170, 186, 257 Satan, 87, 105–6, 201–2, 256–58, 267, 276–78, 283; as anti-Christ, 127; and Grand Inquisitor, 125; possession by, 217; as shabby devil, 129, 202; as Wormwood, 88, 242 scientism: and Chernyshevsky, 43; condemned by Shatov, 104; and consciousness, 148–49, 250, 262–63; definition of, 32; at Fedville, 248, 255; as idol, 106; and Ivan Karamazov, 119; and Percy, 17, 31, 140; and science, 23. See also reason and science search, 42, 58, 160, 161; as horizontal, 163; as scientific, 202; for sin, 203, 207–8, 220; as vertical, 163 secular humanism: and Binx Bolling, 168, 174; conflict with Christianity, 195; and Fedville, 248, 255; as ideology, 12; in Ivan Karamazov, 123; as progressive, 225, 228; of Rita Vaught, 186–87; as sentimental, 83, 86; and Sutter Vaught, 189; in twentieth century, 75 secularism, 87, 91 secular reason, 118; as reason vs. faith, 119 self, 5–6, 7, 13, 197–98; as autonomous, 23, 144, 155, 223, 236; as demoniac, 156, 167, 218; as ethical, 252; as fractured, 23; loss of, 260–61; and non-self, 99; as religious, 252; as selfconscious, 22, 40, 46–47, 53, 240, 141–42, 151, 155, 170; and will power, 35 semiotics: and relations, 239; and semiotic community, 17 sentimentality, 75, 86, 123; and nativism, 86; as pity, 124; as tenderness, 124

 

Index 

297

sexuality: and autonomous self, 146–47; as bestial, 263; in Binx-Kate relationship, 167, 169; and child molestation, 37–38, 197, 215; and demonic possession, 202; and erotic desire, 83, 229; and identity, 83; and intercourse, 53, 213; and Lance Lamar, 202; and malaise, 183,188; and new ideology, 58–59; and perversity, 97; and rape, 36–37; and suicide, 140, 144; as theme, 38; as theory of history, 211; and violence, 231 shabby devil, 196, 209–10; general discussion, 117–35 Shatov, Ivan, 104–5, 115 Simpson, Lewis P., 142, 146, 196 sin: and Binx Bolling, 171; in Kierke­ gaard, 156; as lost value of, 150; and no-sin, 127; and Sutter Vaught, 191 Smerdyakov, Pavel, 118; general discussion, 117–35 Smith, Lonnie, 164 Smith, Rinaldo, Fr., 243, 283; as news-bearer, 260, 270–74 Snegiryov, Ilyusha, 118; general discussion, 117–35 socialism, 104; and Catholicism, 85; Dostoevsky’s attack on, 96 Sources of the Self (Taylor), 10–13 Stavrogin, Nikolai, 206; as autonomous man, 100, 111; and Bishop Tikhon, 108–10; as castaway, 104–5; conscience of, 102; despair of, 99; general discussion, 96–116; and moral sensuality, 113; as non-self, 99; and rape/suicide of Matyrosha, 109, 112; suicide of, 108 stoic asceticism, 111; as code, 227; as ideal, 206; as order, 216 stoicism: of Emily Cutrer, 158–59, 173; and honor, 180; and paganism, 156; and Southern code, 53, 141, 159–60

298 

Index

suffering: of children, 197; of Christ, 35; and consciousness, 49; elimination of, 270; and humanistic values, 12; and Ivan Karamazov, 120; and mystery, 28–29; as ordeal, 50–51, 64, 65; purification by, 133; and Raskolnikov, 64; of Sonya Marmeladov, 63; and underground man, 48, 199 suicide: and despair, 84, 93; in Dostoevsky’s fiction, 27; of Ed Barrett, 229–30; and existential predicament, 38; and ex-suicide, 4, 39, 103; and non-suicide, 39, 103, 200, 202; in Percy family, 16; as protest, 151, 154, 157; of Quentin Compson, 141; and Raskolnikov, 60, 62; and spiritual malaise, 144; of Svidrigalov, 67, 69–70; and Will Barrett, 233 Svetlov, Grushenka, 118, 131, 135; general discussion, 117–35 Taylor, Charles: and Augustine, 43, 177; and autonomous reason, 30; and exclusive secular humanism, 279–80; and interregnum age, 282; and metaphysical order, 86; and ontic Logos, 255 tenderness, 85, 86, 264, 271, 276. See also pity Tocqueville, Alexis de, 37 Tower of Babel: in The Brothers Karamazov, 127, 263; in The Thanatos Syndrome, 263, 266–69 traditional metaphysics, 92 transcendence, 180; as idealism, 180, 189, 192; as repetition, 194 transcendent idealism, 75; as vision, 76, 78, 79 triadic, 186; as relations, 9–10; as semiotic, 195

underground: and Allison Huger, 231; and Binx Bolling, 158, 160; as cave, 233; as escape, 52, 73; general discussion, 40–56; underground man, 198 utilitarian ideology, 49, 51, 58, 61, 64, 67; values of, 62 utopianism: and Blue Boy project, 97; and Dostoevsky, 30; of Fedville physicians, 261; Percy’s satire of, 185, 251–52; and rationalism, 50; as secular dream, 168; and sentimentality, 86; and socialism, 130; and underground man, 44 Vaught, Jamie, 186, 190, 195; general discussion, 176–95 Vaught, Kitty, 180, 183; general discussion, 176–95 Vaught, Rita, 186–87, 195; general discussion, 176–95 Vaught, Sutter, 177, 188–91; general discussion, 176–95 Verkhovtsev, Katerina, 118, 120, 131; general discussion, 117–35 violence: and aberrant sexuality, 140,

147; and Cartesian self, 37; of Stavrogin, 100 Virgin Mary, 276 Voegelin, Eric: and scientism, 32, 149, 151–52; and time, 91 Wasiolek, Edward, 108, 121 What Is to Be Done? (Chernyshevsky), 43 Williams, Rowan: on broken family in Dostoevsky, 178; on “childhood” fetish, 210; on the devil and selfannihilation, 202; on the epilogue to Demons, 109; on Ivan Karamazov and love, 200; on Kirilov as mock Christ, 103–4; negative theology of Dostoevsky, 70; on Prince Myshkin and sexuality, 82 will power: 111; and self-will, 103, 106. See also freedom; free will Wyatt-Brown, Bertram, 13 Yeats, William Butler, 235–36 Zosima, 208, 215, 268, 269; general discussion, 117–35

 

Index 

299

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Walker Percy, and the Age of Suicide was designed in Mrs. Eaves XL Narrow, with Mr. Eaves XL Sans and Aileron display type, and composed by Kachergis Book Design of Pittsboro, North Carolina. It was printed on 60-pound Maple Eggshell Cream and bound by Maple Press of York, Pennsylvania.