Signposts in a Strange Land

by Walker Percy

  So the novelist is entitled to a certain measure of sourness and disenchantment and opting-out. Nevertheless, he may find a degree of use in his very uselessness. If he doesn’t qualify as a prophet these days, he may at least serve as a curious outsider and a watcher, a kind of monitor—something like those instruments they stick into the earth on each side of the San Andreas Fault. In those beautiful peaceful California valleys, everything seems absolutely normal, absolutely intact, except that the instrument regularly records that the earth has sheared another couple of inches.

  Everybody knows more than the novelist, but what the novelist may be good for, despite his shakiness and fecklessness, or perhaps because of it, is to record what other people, absorbed as they are in their busy and useful lives, may not see—a certain upside-downness about modern life—that, for example, there is something deranged about normal people and that crazy people may be trying to tell us something.

  If the novelist’s business is, like that of all artists, to tell the truth, even when he is lying, that is, making up a story, he had better tell the truth no matter how odd it is, even if the truth is a kind of upside-downness. And if it is the novelist’s business to look and see what is there for everyone to see but is nonetheless not seen, and if the novelist is by his very nature a hopeful man—he has to be hopeful or he would not bother to write at all—then sooner or later he must confront the great paradox of the twentieth century: that no other time has been more life-affirming in its pronouncements, self-fulfilling, creative, autonomous, and so on—and more death-dealing in its actions. It is the century of the love of death. I am not talking just about Verdun or the Holocaust or Dresden or Hiroshima. I am talking about a subtler form of death, a death in life, of people who seem to be living lives which are good by all sociological standards and yet who somehow seem more dead than alive. Whenever you have a hundred thousand psychotherapists talking about being life-affirming and a million books about life-enrichment, you can be sure there is a lot of death around.

  Everyone admits the atrocities of the century, which we like to think of as horrifying, inexplicable, and occurring at a great remove from us. True, every century has its horrors, but what the novelist notices, peculiar fellow that he is, is that in these strange times people, himself included, seem to experience life most vividly, most immediately, remember places best, on the occasion of war, assassination, hurricanes, and other catastrophes. The real question is seldom asked. It is not: How do we prevent the final war? but: What do we do if we succeed? Can man get along without war?

  Everyone remembers exactly where he was and what he was doing when Kennedy was shot—how places and things and people and even green leaves seemed to be endowed with a special vividness, a memorable weight. But what the novelist is interested in is the in-between times, the quality of ordinary Wednesday afternoons, which ought to be the best of times, but are, often as not, times when places, people, things, green leaves seem to be strangely diminished and devalued.

  Could it be that this paradoxical diminishment of life in the midst of plenty, its impoverishment in the face of riches, is the peculiar vocation of the novelist to catch a glimpse of, by reason of his very dislocation, but also because none of the experts seem to recognize its existence, let alone explain it? There is something worse than being deprived of life: it is being deprived of life and not knowing it. The poet and the novelist cannot bestow life but they can point to instances of its loss, and then name and record them.

  Perhaps the first inkling of this strange new diagnostic vocation of the novelist was hit upon by Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury and in the person of Quentin Compson. It is no accident, I think, that Quentin arrived at his final solution, not in Yoknapatawpha County, that postage stamp of a universe where most Faulkner scholars do their archaeology, in a Southern locale drenched in history and tragedy, in placidness, but rather in a nonplace, wandering around the back streets of a bland Boston suburb, almost as faceless and featureless a place as a set of map coordinates. Faulkner, as usual, knew what he was doing. If he had set Quentin’s suicide in the South against a backdrop of Gothic decor dark with blood and tears, it would have been robbed of its meaning.

  Quentin was a lover, but a lover of such strange loves as to burst the cheap simulacrum with which the word “love” has come to be invested. He loved his sister but he loved death more—who loved death above all, as Faulkner put it. Loved her and hated this life, life in place and history and clock time, which his father described as the mausoleum of all hope and desire. How, indeed, is one to live in this peculiar time and history and on ordinary Wednesday afternoons? So prophetic was Quentin’s predicament that only now, some fifty years later, are we beginning to grasp the full ambiguity of it: that he was not merely suicidal and therefore sick, and that his love for Caddy was incestuous and therefore even sicker. But that he was also on to something. He could not bear to live in time and place and history, not in the clock time and the bland coordinates of a Northern exurb, and not in the dark, sustaining history of the South. Now it has become possible to wonder, as perhaps it was not possible fifty years ago, to what extent his suicide was his own peculiar response not merely to his own life and history but to this life and these times. That is to say, fifty years ago we might have been content in Quentin’s case with, say, the diagnosis of a Boston psychiatrist: suicide following affective-depressive disorder—perhaps with some Southern genetic pathology. Now we wonder whether Faulkner was not telling us something else, maybe even better than he himself knew. Even the incest theme, Quentin’s love for Caddy, looks less and less like sexual pathology than it does like a longing for a new start, a new order of things, perhaps even a new race of men begotten of Caddy, a new life. Is it possible that Quentin’s strange vision of a new life in hell with Caddy is his own parallel version of Dilsey’s redeemed life here and now, in this time and place, and in the Time Afterward, after her redemption?

  But the novelist, unlike Quentin, must by virtue of his very calling be on the side of life. Otherwise, he would not go to the trouble of writing and put up with all its miseries and loneliness. But, before life can be affirmed for the novelist or his readers, death-in-life must be named. Naming death-in-life as Faulkner did with his character Quentin is a thousand times more life-affirming than all the life-affirming self-help books about me being okay and you being okay and everybody being okay when in fact everybody is not okay, but more than likely in deep trouble. Beware of people who think that everything is okay. My own secret belief is that Leo Buscaglia, leading apostle of love and okayness, is in deep trouble and will soon require psychiatric help.

  Faulkner may have been more prophetic than he knew in dislocating Quentin. If Quentin Compson’s suicide was the failure or refusal to live in a place and in time and in history, it was at least a recognition of the problem—which I take to be better than many current solutions of the problem, that is, avoiding it: avoiding place by moving, avoiding time by filling it, avoiding history both past and present by dreams of the future.

  But, to finish with this strange fellow we started with, the so-called Southern novelist. If there is such a place as the South and if it is as different from the rest of the country as it is said to be, and if the difference lies precisely in its peculiar sense of time and place and history, and if its literature for the past fifty years has been distinguished by this very sense—it’s going to be interesting indeed to see what the next few years bring. Because the South has now been deprived of its chief claim to uniqueness and what some have seen as a wellspring of its literature; namely, defeat and a tragic sense of history. For the South is now victorious. It is not even called the South any longer but the Sunbelt, and the power shift and money shift is far advanced. Even the universities are gradually getting better off, while the Harvard endowment has dropped to almost a billion. Parts of the South are more literate and prosperous than New England in the early 1800s.

  The prospect is a little frightening. For if
the leadership falls to the South, that is to say, the Sunbelt, is there a culture here equal to the task? Or will it go by default to the Sunbelt Southwest, the Dallas–Vegas–L.A. axis? Have you noticed, come to think of it, that weathermen on national TV have started calling this region the Old Confederacy when they point to the weather map, as if it were a slightly embalmed region, a sort of expanded Williamsburg? But the point is: if there was an Old South, did it have time to develop a culture in the plenary sense of a coherent society in which values and beliefs merge to issue in a major literature and art? And if the virtues attributed to the Southern Renascence are valid, the virtues of rootedness in place and time, to what extent will these prove to be enduring virtues, serviceable over the years, and to what extent did these virtues depend on a standing pat and a looking back and a kind of Schadenfreude, a secret relishing and romanticizing of defeat and tragedy, virtues which won’t be much use in a burgeoning Sunbelt of agribusiness, superdomes, condos, and high-rises.

  Quentin Compson opted out of time and place, precisely because Faulkner knew all about time and place and what was wrong with old places drenched in time and new nowhere places out of time. The question for the future is whether in the victorious South there will be writers who can name death-in-life and affirm life even in victory and prosperity.

  One sign that the South has won, after all, is that the Southern Literary Renascence seems to be over. Southern novelists nowadays are in as much trouble as novelists anywhere. I notice a certain tentativeness in young Southern fiction writers—as if they still had one foot in Faulkner country, in O’Connor country, in Welty country, but over there just beyond the interstate loom the gleaming high-rises of Atlanta. So which way to jump? I mean, how do you write about third-generation Snopeses who have moved to Memphis and joined an encounter group?

  But because the South has won doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the South and its literature. Just because we all may soon be able to live in tastefully restored shotgun cottages in New Orleans or carriage houses in Savannah or condos and villas on the golf course, or even in an A-frame on Grandfather Mountain and have cable TV, it doesn’t mean the world has come to an end. Where there is life, there is—and so forth and so forth.

  All joking aside, or rather some joking aside, assuming that we in the South have something unique, unique about its literature, unique about its way of living, which is of value and should be preserved; assuming also that the country as a whole is in deep trouble and this unique something about the South may be of some use, I can only suppose that the coming poets and novelists of the South will face an extraordinary challenge. The challenge will simply be what to do in the face of the peculiar nature of the economic victory of the Sunbelt and the ongoing Los Angelization of the Southern community. I am not at all certain that the present-day South is equal to it. One danger is that the Southern writer may himself, herself, become Los Angelized, Chicagoized, Connecticutized, that he may try to out-Didion Didion, out-Bellow Bellow, out-Cheever Cheever. Then he is sunk for sure. Because they can do it better, those things they do, their little and not so little numbers. I am assuming that by now he or she, the young Southern fiction writer, has finally gotten clear of the ever-lengthening shadow of Yoknapatawpha County, the vast mythic twilight, and will not try to go back—he can’t go back—and will not try to become a neo-Agrarian.

  The Southern novelist can’t go back now, back to the wilderness, back to the small Alabama town in To Kill a Mockingbird. He’d better not even look back. Because if he does, he’ll turn into something worse than Lot’s wife—a bad novelist.

  His real challenge, as it always is with the artist, is somehow to humanize the life around him, to formulate it for someone else, to render the interstates, to tell the truth, to show how life is lived, and therefore to affirm life, not only the lives of poor white people and poor black people in the Georgia countryside and in Mississippi towns and hamlets, in Faulkner country, in Welty country, but even life in a condo on a golf course.

  1986

  How to Be an American Novelist in Spite of Being Southern and Catholic

  MY TITLE IS ONLY half serious. It is serious insofar as it speaks to a curious handicap in the marketplace. The simple empirical economic fact is that people don’t tend to buy Southern novels or Catholic novels and especially not Southern Catholic novels. I recall my astonishment at being told that the salesmen at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, my publisher, wanted me to drop the subtitle of a novel I once wrote called Love in the Ruins, which was, The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World—the suggestion being that the word “Catholic,” even “Bad Catholic,” might put people off. Curious, I say, because both traditions, being a Southern writer and being a Catholic writer, are not dishonorable. Faulkner was not a bad writer. Neither were Dante or Cervantes. Flannery O’Connor united both traditions and is duly, albeit posthumously, celebrated. Yet the fact remains that, to this good day, American critics, that is to say non-Southern American critics, are still baffled by O’Connor and generally can’t make head or tail of what she was about.

  I am interested in examining the reasons for this double disability. I do not think the reasons ordinarily advanced are altogether credible. One hears, for example, that the Southern novel is too self-consciously Gothic, violent, grotesque to be identified with the reader’s ordinary life. And, of course, there is Flannery’s famous rebuttal that the Southern novelist can write about freaks because he, she, can still recognize one. Implied here is the theological issue that, ever since the beginnings of the so-called Southern Literary Renascence, theological concerns have informed Southern literature in a sense not comprehensible to the secularized mind of the non-Southern reader, who has lost his theological bearings and therefore has no standard by which he can determine who is a freak and who is not—and who himself is apt to be more freakish than he might realize.

  Yet these familiar arguments do not seem to address the crude commercial reality of the bookstore, the mysterious fact that a serious and excellent novel can somehow get labeled Southern or Catholic in such a way as to put off the reader. The mystery lies in the fact that there is something more than ethnicity or regionalism involved. For example, the same prospective reader is evidently not put off by the ethnic Jewishness of, say, a Malamud or a Roth or a Bellow. Nor is it held against Updike and Cheever that they generally write about a very localized and atypical Northeast upper middle class.

  Could it be simply that more Jews and more Northeasterners buy and read books than do Southerners and that they would rather read about themselves? Not necessarily, because a Styron can write about a young Southerner and a Holocaust survivor and be widely read. And, of course, there are Catholic writers who specialize in novels about papal intrigue, spies in the Vatican, the misdeeds of bishops, and sell very well.

  Or could it be simply that many Americans don’t like Southerners or Catholics? But, then, presumably many of these same Americans don’t like Jews, either.

  No, the reasons are more mysterious. I suspect they have to do with the curious phenomenon of labeling, which probably falls within the domain of semiotics, or the science of signs. Somehow, when a novel gets labeled as Southern or Catholic, the labeling entails a tighter and more inclusive semantic bonding than if the novel were described as, say, Midwestern or Protestant. This has little to do, I think, with ordinary prejudice, whether anti-Southernor anti-Catholic. What happens is that when a customer walks into a bookstore and inquires about a book and is told that it is a distinguished Southern novel, the novel tends to be automatically assigned to a certain category or pigeonhole where it is perceived as having certain exotic and recognizable properties, so much so that the reader almost feels that he already knows what it is about. What I would also like to suggest is that the Southern novelist may not be altogether blameless, that he or she can easily succumb to the temptation of the exotic, to past successes of Southern writers, ever since Cable and Mark Twain, at playing th
e old game of amazing Yankees. Even Faulkner, I suspect, yielded sometimes to the temptation of “writing Southern”; that is, of living up to a certain degree of exoticness expected of one—in much the same way that a Southerner might find himself talking more Southern on Fifth Avenue than he would dream of talking on Peachtree Street.

  But before getting around to the Southern novelist, let me say a word about the general state of American letters. It is poor. In the first place, only about two percent of Americans regularly read books. Of this two percent, only a small fraction read serious novels. We’re talking about a hundred thousand people at the most. Whereas sixty million people watched the episode in Dallas which solved the mystery of who shot J.R.

  One diagnosis of this state of affairs by men of letters might run something like this: literacy in America has declined for a variety of reasons—bad schools, decay of the family, most of all, the six or seven hours of daily TV. This decline of literacy is accompanied by a rise in philistinism in America: a preference for the skillfully marketed and packaged product for the consumption of the mass man—the Top Ten on TV, NFL telecasts with the quite well-done Miller Lite and Mean Joe Green commercials—plus a few big commercial novels, whether the Harold Robbins novel in which sex figures second only to money, the Barbara Cartland novel in which sex becomes something called romance, or the Judy Blume novel in which teenagers are introduced to sex like Tarzan and Jane.

  Other causes of philistinism are cited: the takeover of independent publishers by the conglomerates who are not interested in taking on a young promising novelist, losing money on him or her against the time when his promise might be fulfilled—like Hemingway or Faulkner.