Signposts in a Strange Land

by Walker Percy

  These facts may be true enough. But it is not simple. There is another reason for the poor state of the American novel. It is the poor state of the American novel. The fact is that novels these days, even serious, so-called literary novels, are not very good. In fact, with a few honorable exceptions, they are atrocious; that is to say, ill conceived or badly written or both.

  I recently had the depressing experience of serving as a judge in a national fiction contest and having to read some 250 novels. I won’t pretend I read all of them. Sometimes it is enough to read one page or even one paragraph. These were, presumably, the best offerings of the publishers. My only conclusion is that, far from it being the case that it is all but impossible to get a first novel published these days, surely anybody can get a novel published. Either that or 250 authors have connections, are the girlfriends or boyfriends of editors.

  Even serious writers, writers of established reputations, seem to be either repeating themselves without enthusiasm or getting hysterical or withdrawing into private sex fantasies. Political novelists, once full of energy and the good vinegar of protest in the 1960s, take to writing reveries about Marilyn Monroe.

  I have a theory about the unhappiness of what I would call the American protest novelist; that is, the novelist, usually from the Northeast, sometimes the West Coast, with strong ideological, generally leftist, convictions. My theory is that he secretly envies Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, despite the terrible ordeal which Solzhenitsyn suffered, despite his rightest sympathies. He envies the fact that a novelist can so irritate the state that the state will go to a great deal of trouble to get rid of him. Solzhenitsyn takes on the entire leadership of the Soviet Union, indicts it before the world, and gets away with it. There, imprisoned in the Gulag, is the indomitable novelist writing his novel in secret and on toilet paper; and here is the American novelist, free, uncensored, with his word processor and plenty of paper—and stuck on dead center, stalled out, paralyzed by freedom. Moreover, he, Solzhenitsyn, wins. He not only takes on the state, he beats it, turns his ordeal to good account, makes a metaphor of his imprisonment, and wins the Nobel Prize.

  Compare the American protest novelist. He, too, takes on the whole establishment, attacks Nixon, Eisenhower, whoever, attacks American middle-class values. And what happens? Nothing. He waits in vain for the knock at the door, for the FBI to haul him off for questioning. He even watches Presidential news conferences, hoping to be denounced. Nobody denounces him. In fact, nobody pays much attention.

  Worst of all, if the novel is a commercial success, it is bought by Hollywood. The poor radical protest writer becomes a rich radical protest writer. And surely the worst indignity of all: he is seduced by the enemy without the enemy’s knowledge. He is like the wretched man in Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground who swore to get even with his enemy by walking directly toward him on the sidewalk and forcing him to yield—and who at the last second yields himself, without the other even noticing. Whereupon he, the protest writer, is apt to become hysterical. I am thinking of two writers who evidently believed that if the attack could be made shrill enough, outlandish enough, atrocious enough, the Establishment would have to take notice. One writer wrote a play, MacBird, whose thesis was that Lyndon Johnson had conspired like Macbeth to have Kennedy killed. Another wrote a novel about the Rosenberg case in which Nixon makes love to Ethel Rosenberg and ends by being sodomized by Uncle Sam in Times Square.

  Still, no one paid much attention, least of all the political establishment.

  It is both the curse and the blessing of American novelists that no one has taken them seriously since Harriet Beecher Stowe. Can you imagine an American President saying to an American novelist these days, as Lincoln said to Harriet Beecher Stowe: “So you are the little lady who started the big war?”

  It is a curse, because the American artist, like the American professor, comes to feel that he occupies a marginal and far from honorific place in the culture. Unlike the Herr Professor in Heidelberg, or Sartre or Camus in France, he seems increasingly irrelevant to the main concerns of society. It is a blessing, because the American novelist, dispensed against his will from effective ideological partisanship, has to come across on a bigger scale and in spite of his ideology. Sartre had a political following and was the worse for it. He wrote his best novel when he was sitting alone and bemused in a café in Le Havre. Dante and Dostoevsky were as narrowly partisan as they come, but The Divine Comedy and The Possessed succeeded in spite of their political vendettas.

  The American novelist, that is to say, has in the end to fall back from politics to a statement about the human condition—or else write unseriously. Hence Huckleberry Finn, Moby-Dick, and The Sound and the Fury. Then he’s taken seriously. A final remark about “Northern” novelists. They are often accused of writing not only overly politicized books but dirty books. The accusation is unjust. I don’t know any serious writers who are pornographers; that is, who deliberately set out to titillate the reader, hoping he, the reader, will pass the word and more people will buy the book. Not that there are not plenty of pornographers, but I’m not interested in them. I am not interested in making a moral condemnation of pornography, because pornography involves a different set of stimuli from literature and therefore does not concern us here. No, the explicit and obligatory sex in so many novels, like the hysterical politics, is often a frantic and last-ditch attempt to get the attention of an increasingly listless readership. Like the hysterical political novel which is written from the fear that nobody is listening, the kinky-sex novel is often written from the fear of writing about real and age-old human relationships. There is this to be said about the current pornographic novel: it is generally less boring than the nonpornographic novel. I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death. After all, sex is interesting, even to a solitary novelist. Especially to a solitary novelist. The most outlandish and atrocious protest novel is largely ignored. But so is the explicit-sex novel. Who is left to be shocked?—except a few PTA members and library boards here and there. So, like a drowning swimmer whose frantic gestures are ignored by the folks on the beach, the novelist resorts to even more bizarre exhibitions.

  Take a recent example: The World According to Garp, much admired by some people. The crucial scene is an auto accident in which one person is killed and another person is castrated in an act of fellatio. This is no mean literary feat: to unite gratuitous violence, kinky sex, and bizarre tragicomedy in one scene.

  The key word is gratuitous. Only if the action is sufficiently uncalled for and sufficiently bizarre can the novelist penetrate the benumbed senses of the reader and especially the critic. The novel, of which this is the climactic scene, was hailed as a fresh and original talent.

  This fictive technique can be defended—like the Mississippi farmer who said that it takes a two-by-four to get the attention of a mule.

  This is the main difference between the Northern novel and the Southern novel: where there is nothing to attack or defend, the novelist has only one recourse: he has to do stunts. And like a circus acrobat’s, each stunt has to be more death-defying than the last. Which brings me to the present-day so-called Southern novel—which is, if possible, in even worse shape.

  We hear a good deal about the Southern Literary Renascence. It’s all true. There was such a thing and I don’t have to tell you how remarkable it was. Within the space of twenty or thirty years there occurred a flowering of poetry, fiction, and criticism unprecedented since the New England of Hawthorne and Thoreau and Emerson. What we do not hear about and what is not generally noticed or remarked is that not only is the Southern Literary Renascence over and done with. The Great Literary Depression has set in.

  This is to say only that, as far as I can tell, there are very few promising young novelists coming along. There are any number of festivals and seminars which celebrate the Southern Literary Renascence. But what nobody likes to talk about is that there are few if any writers under
forty who could be called renascent.

  Among the 250 or so novels I had the misfortune to have to read last year, Southern fiction was, with one or two exceptions, both scantier and more dispirited than the rest. It was as if the young Southern fiction writers were well enough aware of the great figures of the Renascence—Faulkner, Warren, Welty, O’Connor, and the rest—but were themselves at something of a loss. One certainly wanted to get out from under Faulkner, but where do you go from there? There were a few examples of what I would call the Tennessee–Texas School, recounting the picaresque adventures of country-music types, hell-raisin’ drunk-in-the-whorehouse good ol’ boys whose profoundest thoughts were about bad cops and bad preachers—a far cry from the Nashville poets of the 1920s and of a general literary quality just short of Smokey and the Bandit.

  As for Southern women novelists, I seem to detect the emergence of a new genre. Unlike their Northern sisters who go in for heavy feminist accounts of the alienation of housewives in Teaneck, of anxiety and depression and suicide among Radcliffe grads, an increasing number of Southern women novelists are writing what I would call the Southern Belle Confessional Novel, or What Really Went on at Sweet Briar.

  An interesting reversal of social roles is taking place. In past times women writers like George Eliot and George Sand might be noted for their unconventional sexual behavior but nevertheless wrote the standard fictive prose acceptable to a civil society. But there is now a new female Southern writer who does the opposite: who talks nice and writes dirty—just like Mary Lou down the street—because she is Mary Lou down the street.

  The conventional wisdom is that the Southern writer had a literary advantage because he inhabited a region which had, as we have heard so often, a sense of place, of rootedness, of kinship, a tradition of storytelling, and perhaps, above all, a tragic sense of history. This was true enough and to a degree is still true.

  The Southern asset was always the presence of tradition, both Christian and Greco-Roman, which was palpable enough so that even in its decadence there was something of substance to get hold of, to attack, the crumbling porticos, the gentry gone to seed like Faulkner’s Compsons. And to defend: so that a Catholic writer like Flannery O’Connor could find herself nourished by the extravagant backwoods Protestant fundamentalism of Georgia.

  What does the Northern novelist have to attack or defend? Republicans? A defunct liberalism? And when he attacks or defends, who cares? What does John Irving have to defend? Or attack? Circus bears? A dog with a cute name like Sorrow? A bear with the cute name State o’Maine who can drive a motorcycle? None of these are pornographers. Jerzy Kosinski writes dirty these days, not by design, but by default. He doesn’t have anything else to write about. In some cases, dirty writing must be defended. Kosinski writing dirty is less boring than Kosinski writing clean. But even in the best of times, the Southern writer was at a certain disadvantage in the marketplace. His attraction was ever a certain exoticness, either Gothic violence or outlandish humor. But there was a price to be paid. The Southern novelist, from Cable on, is tempted to exploit the Northern reader’s gullibility about Southern exoticness and to tell whoppers. But the game gets old in the end and Southern novels get labeled as such—so that if a new book is heralded as a “Southern novel in the best tradition,” the book buyer is all too apt to pass it up because he has had enough of Southern novels in any tradition.

  So the Southern novel became a victim of its own success. Its secret of success was that at first it was easy to captivate Yankees, whether by Cable’s quaint Creoles or Caldwell’s rednecks or Faulkner’s broken-down gentry. I’ve always suspected that even Faulkner laid it on a bit thick—and knew that he did so—the thicker the better for innocent Yankee critics like Malcolm Cowley who are prepared to believe anything about Mississippi. But what to do now when the game has been played out and the old defeated and exotic South has turned overnight into the victorious and prosperous Sunbelt, and Atlanta and Dallas look more and more like New York. And Lafayette looks more and more like Houston.

  So the aspiring novelist in the Sunbelt is apt to find himself at a loss.

  Should he, sitting in his Atlanta or Houston high-rise, try to recapture his rural roots, when the chances are that he never saw a sharecropper’s cabin or a cracker except when he was driving through southern Georgia on his way to Fort Lauderdale for the spring break?

  Or should he try to catch up with Updike and Cheever and do a number on the Hilton Head crowd? But it’s hard to beat Cheever and Updike on their own ground.

  He doesn’t know quite what to do and that may explain an article I read in a Texas journal which called attention to the embarrassing fact that there are no first-class writers of fiction in all of Texas. Think of it! The state which has the biggest and best of everything, which is probably on its way to being the richest state in the Union, furthermore has lavish cultural facilities, as they are called, good symphony orchestras, art museums, and so forth, yet not a single first-line novelist!

  I’m not sure we in Louisiana have any reason to congratulate ourselves, since we are rapidly becoming Texasized. Just the other day I read about a local oil man who had made two billion dollars and boasted that he had never read a single novel. I wish I could be sure he had made a mistake.

  Just as the celebrated virtues of locale and tradition can become a burden to the new Southern novelist, so can that other mainstay of Southern culture, its pervasive Christianity. It is still there in a sense in which it is not there in the rest of the country. It is part of the air we breathe. It may be there to nourish and inform as it has some writers. It may be there to oppress and therefore to be attacked and satirized, but it is there.

  The South has been called a Jesus-haunted country. Even when the Southern writer was not a believer, he could not escape, would not want to escape this haunting presence. There are two things Southern writers have always been stuck with, blacks and Jesus. This obsession works both ways, for better and worse. In the best writers, believer or unbeliever, it works wonders. Dilsey, in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, goes to church on Easter Sunday and for this reason is the only whole living person in the household of ghostly Compsons.

  Even Erskine Caldwell, out to profane, had to have something to profane. Try to imagine Caldwell’s Jeeter Lester blaspheming in California. Who would care? How do you blaspheme in California? What does blasphemy signify in a counterculture?

  Like Flannery O’Connor, I would defend the Christian culture of the South as, on the whole, a literary asset. From a Catholic perspective at least, Christianity is a belief inherently congenial to the vocation of the novelist in a way in which, say, Buddhism, Marxism, Freudianism, behaviorism, is not. To say so offends the conventional wisdom that dogma constrains the freedom of the artist. The word “dogma” of course has gotten to be a swear word and is used pejoratively. Whereas what it signifies, of course, is simply belief in the central Christian mysteries; for example, the Incarnation. In this sense, dogma is a guarantee of the mystery of human existence and for the novelist, for this novelist anyhow, a warrant to explore the mystery. I’ve never met a believing artist who felt constrained by his belief, but I’ve met any number who believed in nothing but an abstract freedom and who were not only constrained but paralyzed by some internal inquisition of their own making.

  The Christian ethos sustains the narrative enterprise in ways so familiar to us that they can be overlooked. It underwrites those very properties of the novel without which there is no novel: I am speaking of the mystery of human life, its sense of predicament, of something having gone wrong, of life as a wayfaring and a pilgrimage, of the density and linearity of time and the sacramental reality of things. The intervention of God in history through the Incarnation bestows a weight and value to the individual human narrative which is like money in the bank to the novelist. Original Sin is out of fashion, both with Christians and with Jews, let alone unbelievers. But any novelist who does not believe that his character finds
himself in a predicament not entirely of his own making or of society’s making is in trouble as a novelist. And any novelist who begins his novel with his character in a life predicament which is a profound mystery to which he devotes his entire life to unraveling, like Pascal’s man in his cell—which is to say, every great novelist for the past three hundred years from Cervantes to Camus—is a closet Jew or Christian whether he likes it or not.

  Another way of saying this is that I don’t recall reading a good novel which was informed by a Marxist belief in an inexorable dialectic of history—and I’ve read plenty of bad ones—or a good novel informed by a preoccupation with the mechanisms of one’s own psyche, or a good novel which was informed by a belief in the illusoriness of this here-and-now life in this here-and-now world. If the world is not real, why bother to write a novel about it or read a novel about it? And, for this reason, very few Buddhists, Californian or Asian, have.

  Yet we are all familiar with a great literature going back at least as far as Dante informed by the tragedy and comedy of real people each embarked on a real pilgrimage for good and ill.

  The Southern novel of a generation ago was so informed. So is the current so-called Jewish novel, which, though apparently past its prime, is the liveliest of current American literary phenomena.

  It has always seemed curious to me, by the way, that the Jewish experience, apparently such a rich source of literature in the Northeast and Midwest, has so far no comparable counterpart in the South. And yet the Southern Jewish experience is singularly rich, both in its own right and in its sensitivity to the complex social class and race mix which comprises the South. The Southern WASP, Catholic, and humanist traditions have found voices. The Southern woman novelist is, of course, preeminent. There are distinguished black voices. But the Southern Jewish voice, with a few exceptions, is yet to be heard. I don’t quite know why. I make no claim to prophetic powers, yet I make bold to predict that the next Southern literary revival will be led by a Jewish mother, which is to say, a shrewd self-possessed woman with a sharp eye and a cunning retentive mind who sees the small follies and triumphs and tragedies around her and has her own secret method of rendering it, with an art all her own and yet not unrelated to Welty, O’Connor, and Porter. It may take a Southern Jewish voice to articulate the fact, increasingly evident, that the modern world is in the grip of demonic powers. Like Isaac Singer, she might speak of demons; unlike Singer, she might mean it. And, unlike Singer, she might be taken seriously.