Walker Percy and the Politics of the Wayfarer by Brian A. Smith

Author:Brian A. Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 5

Dreaming of the End Times

Anxiety concerning the decline and fall of civilization appears throughout Percy’s body of work. It may be that he shared this trait with all serious moralists.1 What sets Percy’s account of this issue apart from others rests in not only his preoccupation with depicting actual disaster for what it might tell us about human nature or our politics, but also his focus on mining our obsession with the end of our society as a clue that might help explain our predicament in modern times.

The contingency “what if the Bomb should fall?” is not only not a cause of anxiety in the alienated man but is one of his few remaining refuges from it. When everything else fails, we may always turn to our good friend just back from Washington or Moscow, who obliges us with his sober second thoughts—“I can tell you this much, I am profoundly disturbed”—and each of us has what he came for, the old authentic thrill of the Bomb and the Coming of the Last Days. Like Ortega’s romantic, the heart’s desire of the alienated man is to see vines sprouting through the masonry. The real anxiety question, the question no one asks because no one wants to, is the reverse: What if the Bomb should not fall? What then? (MB 84–85)

As a novelist and essayist, Percy saw his role as reading the signs of our spiritual and social disorders, and rendering them intelligible to an audience that increasingly possessed a language inadequate to understanding the situation.

Percy’s method here matches his understanding of the limitations of current language. He suggested that if you tell a contemporary American he or she suffers from alienation, he or she probably will not understand your point. Indeed, without recourse to therapeutic or medical terminology, it is unclear that he or she could comprehend the diagnosis. By contrast, Percy suspected that a writer who depicts alienation in a story that engages the reader’s emotions, naming the situation in relatable terms, might have some ability to reveal the notion to his readers. Percy explained how he viewed his ambition as a writer in the following terms:

A serious novel about the destruction of the United States and the end of the world should perform the function of prophecy in reverse. The novelist writes about the coming end in order to warn about present ills and so avert the end. . . . If he did not think he saw something other people didn’t see or at least didn’t pay much attention to, he would be wasting his time writing and they reading. This does not mean he is wiser than they. . . . The novelist is less like a prophet than he is like the canary that coal miners used to take down into the shaft to test the air. When the canary gets unhappy, utters plaintive cries, and collapses, it may be time for the miners to surface and think things over. (MB 101)

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