Signposts in a Strange Land

by Walker Percy

  Next I considered the title “The Vocation of the Southern Novelist.” This sounded only a little less grandiose and more than a little dreary. The expression “the Southern novelist” has always depressed me, conjuring up as it does a creature both exotic and familiar and therefore boring, like a yak or llama in the zoo—this in a sense in which the expression Northeastern novelist or Missouri novelist does not.

  There is nothing logically wrong with the noun-phrase “Southern novelist.” It does no more than denote someone who has a connection with the South and writes novels. As such, I have no objection to it and indeed would not have it otherwise, since I cannot imagine writing what I write if I did not come from the South. Maybe I’d be a novelist if I came from Idaho, but I doubt it.

  The trouble is, the expression “Southern novelist” connotes too powerfully in the public consciousness, so powerfully that the connotation tends to close off the class so that all instances of the class tend to get assigned to the class like a Disposall. You can imagine, for example, a non-Southerner browsing in a non-Southern bookstore, picking up an interesting-looking new novel and inquiring of the non-Southern clerk, who may say something like, “She’s one of the best young Southern novelists,” whereupon the non-Southern customer is apt to put it back in short order, thinking he knows all he wants to know about Southern novelists, including female Southern novelists—which is one reason why Southern novelists don’t sell many books.

  What I object to is the undue attribution of a particular sort of regionalism which the expression invites—regionalism in the bad parochial sense, not the good universal sense in which the best writers are all regionalists. Even William Faulkner is generally thought of as a Southern novelist. But Hemingway and Bellow are not thought of as Northern novelists. Cervantes is not thought of as an Andalusian novelist. Cezanne is not thought of as a Provence painter.

  Therefore, I refuse to say anything about Southern novelists as such. So the proper title of these remarks should be something like “Some Disconnected Remarks about the Peculiar Activity of Novel-Writing,” or rather “The Peculiar Activity of the Novel-Writing of One Person Living in the State of Louisiana during What May Well Be the Last Years of Western Civilization.”

  Not exactly a jazzy title. Not exactly a broad, universal, or uplifting subject.

  But it can’t be helped. The older I get, the less I seem to know, and the less edifying my writing is. When I was thirty, I thought I had things pretty well figured out—or at least I believed that those things which were not already explained by science were in principle explainable. When I was forty, I thought that what was not explainable by science—and there turned out to be a lot—could be explained by bringing God into it.

  But now I have difficulty with the simplest questions, questions which I am sure graduate students have ready answers for.

  Take American literature, for example. I do not have the faintest idea why there was a great literature in New England in the first half of the nineteenth century, growing out of a sour Puritanical money-grubbing society—and no comparable literature in the South at the same time, though we like to think we had the makings of just such a culture, a leisure class, close connections with Europe, Walter Scott, The Edinburgh Review and The Spectator on our bookshelves.

  So I don’t know why a successful mercantile society in Massachusetts produced a handful of great writers and a successful patrician agrarian society in South Carolina and Virginia did not. Nor do I know why a victorious North after the Civil War did not produce a great literature—while the South, not merely defeated but exploited like a colony for the next half century, then further impoverished by the Great Depression—why the South, just then of all times, should suddenly have produced the Fugitive poets, the New Criticism, and how it ever came to pass that a dandyish affected young man should have come home to an insignificant Mississippi town and written The Sound and the Fury—which is something like Jerome Kern writing Show Boat in Hollywood and going home to Brooklyn to write Beethoven’s Third Symphony.

  My inability to account for such things and many other things as well has to do with what I conceived to be the extremely limited vocation of the novelist, this novelist anyhow, in these times. The novelist, I have come to believe, is only good for one or two things these days—and they do not include being prophetic or making broad pronouncements about the decline of the West, the nature of evil, loneliness, God, and so forth. The embarrassment of the novelist is that after he masters his one or two tricks, does his little turn, some readers tend to ascribe this success to a deeper wisdom—whereas it is probably the very condition of his peculiar activity that he doesn’t know anything else—which is to say that a person who asks a novelist anything about life and such, how to live it, is in a bad way, indeed.

  No, what interests novelists in these peculiar times, or at least this novelist, and what they are mainly good for, is not such large subjects as God, man, and the world, but rather what he perceives as fault lines in the terrain, small clues that something strange is going on, a telltale sign here and there. Sign of what? A sign that things have gotten very queer without anyone seeming to notice it, that sane people seem to him a little crazy, and crazy people sometimes look knowledgeable—a little like the movie The Body Snatchers, where everybody looks and acts normal, except that they are not—but no one notices, except the poor novelist, who has nothing better to do than to notice that people are not themselves yet feel obliged to act as if they were.

  There have been times when societies were triumphant and became true cultures, when people, through their values and beliefs, knew who they were and were at one with themselves. And then maybe it was the function of poets to celebrate the triumph. The Iliad, the Aeneid, The Divine Comedy, Henry V, War and Peace were such celebrations.

  Even in bad times, major writers had major roles—like Langland, Chaucer, Milton, Whitman. Because, bad as times were, there was still a consensus of sorts. Symbols signified. A people could be rallied, consoled, entertained, told stories to, or at least affirmed in their unhappiness. A dirge, a lament, even a jeremiad, implies an intact society.

  But what to make of times such as these about which antonymous adjectives, best and worst, desperate and hopeful, signify equally? It is a peculiar century which sees the greatest advances in science and in the social betterment of man, yet which has been called by Raymond Aaron the century of terror. It is a time notable not so much for its series of world catastrophes, the millions who have been slaughtered, the Holocaust, but for the banality with which these atrocities are committed and taken note of.

  In such peculiar times it is perhaps one function of the novelist to mention these peculiarities—like an obnoxious little boy calling attention to the Emperor’s state of undress. In this case, the Emperor is the German doctor who loves Mozart best of all and plays in a quartet as a relaxation from his experiments in the death camps—or the decent middle-class Englishman who flies the lead Lancaster bomber which marks out an undefended Dresden for the firestorm. Both are following orders and both, if they are good Germans and Englishmen, love their dachshunds and corgis and detest cruelty to animals. Is it an accident that the century of terror is also the century of sentimentality? What the novelist notices is not how awful the happenings are but how peculiar it is that people don’t seem to notice how awful the happenings are.

  Technology advances. The media improves dramatically. Consider the difference between the poor black-and-white photographs of the bodies stacked like cordwood at Dachau and the superb color shots of the gaily dressed bodies at Jonestown. The numbers of innocent dead are huge but do not amaze: six million in Germany, fifteen million in the Ukraine are no more comprehensible than the billions and billions of light-years Carl Sagan talks about. One listens, looks, then tunes into a talk show where people get properly angry about potholes, labor unions, handguns, inflation. And, after all, what else can one do? It is the century of good times, instant media, large numbers,
and telephotos of stacked corpses.

  The times are actually crazier than this, because it is not as if this were simply another dreadful century like the fourteenth, the century of the Black Death—which everyone knew was a bad time. But what is one to make of a century which is not only the worst but also in some ways the best. Because it is in some ways the best. The advance of science and technology is little short of miraculous. It is the first time in history that a poor man, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, could free himself from a lifetime of grinding poverty, disease, and early death.

  To add to the difficulties of the novelist in such peculiar times is the breakdown of the consensus, of a common language, a shared discourse denoting a common set of referents. Poets and novelists and nonpoets and nonnovelists don’t seem to be living in the same world or talking about the same things.

  Poets and novelists seemed to be possessed by a whole separate coven of witches, demons, terrors, and premonitions, of which the general population seems by and large oblivious. Either one is crazy and the other sane, or the former has gone crazy for reasons which the latter has not yet caught on to.

  And, to tell you the truth, I am still not sure which is right: whether it is the poet and novelist who, like the man in Allen Tate’s definition, is a shaky man trying to reassure himself in a generally sane world, or whether it is the population at large which is slowly going mad and the poet who has the sensibility or vulnerability—thin skin—to notice it.

  Particularly striking is the contrast between apocalypse and well-being in the New South. How can a magazine like Southern Living, whose message, if it has a message, is: Here is the good life in a good place—how can such a magazine, the most successful publication in the history of the South, be published in the century of terror? Is it because the South, or parts of the South, is in fact one of the last places where one can in fact live a civil life among civil folk—or is it just that in the Sunbelt the diversions of technology, restoration, climate, media, sports, and fun are more successful? Or is it both? What interests the latter-day novelist anyhow is that here is the proper locale for his own peculiar apocalypse—not the sociological horrors of the Old South, Tobacco Road, and the Snopeses, not even the falling apart of the New South cities, the street crimes and drugs—but the more elusive apocalypse of the country club, the quaint Vieux Carré, the five thousand happy Midwest tourists who visit a tastefully restored mansion on the River Road. I wouldn’t dare write of the twentieth century as such—most writers, I believe, sense that these evils are too vast and too close to be portrayed in any aesthetic mode; in fact, my own hunch is that only a major theological vision like Dostoevsky’s can accommodate such evils, that a truly demonic age is too much for writers of sociological realism. Therefore, I tend to agree with Vonnegut, who said that the only way to write about such vast atrocities is not to write about them. He lived through the firestorm at Dresden and was able to write a novel about it by not describing the firestorm.

  But show me a couple, a man and wife, who have moved into the condo of their dreams on the Gulf Coast or fronting the Heritage golf course at Hilton Head to live the good life, except that the man is spending seven instead of six hours in front of his cable TV and has graduated from a six-pack to an eight-pack, and the woman is spending more and more time at Gloria Marshall’s and reading Nancy Friday and Judith Krantz—and neither man nor wife has said a word to the other for days, let alone touched each other—and I’m on home grounds.

  It is one thing to live in bad times where a common language is spoken, values and beliefs shared in common, like the fourteenth century, which had the Black Plague but also had Langland and Chaucer, one of whom wrote about how bad things were and the other told stories and cheered everybody up and both were understood. It is something else to live in a time of great good and evil which nobody understands, where there are many kinds of discourse each of which makes a kind of sense to its own community, but where the communities don’t make sense to each other and none of them makes sense to the novelist, who feels more and more like the canary being taken down the mine shaft with a bunch of hearty joking sense-making miners while he, the canary, is already getting a whiff of something noxious and is staggering around his cage trying to warn the miners, but they can’t understand him nor he them.

  The deeper we get into the century, the more sense people make, but they are making different kinds of senses which don’t compute with each other. Carl Sagan explains everything without God, from the most distant galaxies to our own individual nastiness, which is caused by our reptilian brains. Radio and TV preachers explain everything by God, man’s happiness with God, man’s unhappiness without God. Humanists explain everything by coming out for the freedom and dignity of the individual. One hundred million books have been written by psychotherapists on how to be creative and self-fulfilling. And here’s this nice ordinary American who works hard all day and is watching his six hours of TV and his wife is reading The National Enquirer and is more likely to set store by astrology and psychics than by science or God. The slaughter and the terror of the century continues. And people are, by and large, nicer than ever.

  It is a peculiar time, indeed, when a writer doesn’t know who the enemy is, or, even worse, when he can’t stand his friends. I mean, you have to envy a writer like Flannery O’Connor, who saw the enemy clearly, namely a certain sort of triumphant humanist, and who could discern the orthodox virtues of backwoods preachers and of assorted nuts and murderers. She knew where the devils were, but if she were beating the same devils now, she would find herself in some strange company, on the same side as Jerry Falwell and Jimmy Swaggart. Of course, just because Jimmy Swaggart believes in God doesn’t mean that God does not exist. But it doesn’t make life any easier for the novelist. Indeed, it is probably yet another sign of the general derangement of the times that a writer these days who happens to be a believer is more apt to feel at home with the hardheads, the unbelievers, rakes, drunks, skeptics, Darwinians, than with the Moral Majority. But here again: just because the Moral Majority comes out for morality doesn’t mean that one should be immoral.

  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, as the poet said. But just when you’ve decided you have no use for the Moral Majority, you hear them attacked by the likes of Bob Guccione, editor of Penthouse, and Sidney Sheldon, novelist of a certain sort, and you’re not so sure. But what about the unbelieving novelist? He has his own troubles. If you feel obliged to take on the Establishment, capitalism, Christendom, to save the environment, to shoot down the bourgeoisie in the good old-fashioned rebel style of Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Hemingway, Ernest Thompson Seton, you may also find yourself with some strange bedfellows, assorted California flakes who are into this and that mind-altered states, saving snail darters, chanting mantras. My favorite bumper stickers are slightly deranged, not the ones like HONK IF YOU LOVE JESUS or NO NUKES or JANE FONDA YES! but rather NUKE JANE FONDA. My favorite is: GOAT ROPERS NEED LOVE TOO.

  All this is to say only that the vocation of the fiction writer has no doubt always been a peculiar business and is now more peculiar than usual. A recent poll reported that about half of American college graduates are depressed, disliked their jobs and spouses, suffered identity crises, didn’t know who they were or what they wanted to do. Come to think of it, this is also a good description of a novelist. No doubt there have been times when poets and novelists knew what they wanted to do, were the celebrants of the culture, the pointers-out who set forth meanings and goals. But it may be the very nature of the novelist now that he knows less, can do less than anybody else, and therefore is not fit to do anything much, except stand back and watch for cracks in the edifice.

  Certainly, there are plenty of experts who seem to know everything in their fields. Carl Sagan seems to know everything about science. Jimmy Swaggart knows everything about God and salvation. Irene Kassorla knows everything about what nice girls do.

  The trouble is that when you put together half a
dozen experts on religion, science, creativity, and sexuality, plus their lay followers, what you’ve got is a small deranged society.

  To make matters worse, the novelist has to work with a medium which, like everything else these days, is polluted. Words are polluted. Plots are polluted. In the best movie of last year, a disturbed young man played by Timothy Hutton consults a psychiatrist a couple of times, breaks down, hugs the psychiatrist, says “I love you,” and is cured. He also has a communication problem with his father. They both break down, hug, cry, say “I love you.” All is well. Lines of communication are opened. Love is the answer. Who is going to protect words like “love,” guard against their devaluation? One hopeful sign about the movie was that God was not mentioned.

  True, love does make the world go round. In fact, I believe it does. The trouble is that when words get abused, cheapened, exhausted, worn thin as poker chips, the novelist is losing his only tools. Always in deep trouble, he is now in deeper trouble than usual.

  The great poets and novelists always wrote about the nature of God and love, of man and woman. But how can even Dante write about the love of God, the love of a man for a woman, if he lives in a society in which God is the cheapest word of the media, as profaned by radio preachers as by swearing. And “love?” Love is the way sit-com plots and soap operas get resolved a hundred times a week.

  In such times as these, a time of pollution and corruption of meaning, it is no wonder that the posture the novelist often finds natural is that of derision, mockery, subversion, and assault—to mock and subvert the words and symbols of the day in order that new words come into being or that old words be freshly minted—to assault the benumbed sensibility of the poor media consumer, because anything other than assault and satire can only be understood as a confirmation of the current corrupted meanings of such honorable old words as love, truth, beauty, brotherhood of man, life, and so on. There may be times when the greatest service a novelist can do his fellow man is to follow General Patton’s injunction: Attack, attack, attack. Attack the fake in the name of the real.