One of Walker Percy’s recurring preoccupations in his novels was with the critical disconnect he saw between humankind’s “angelic” and “bestial” aspects, and how this disconnect always engendered despair (in the Kierkegaardian understanding of that word). Writing in the mid-to-late 20th century, and already established as a formidable American semiotician, Percy had an intuitive grasp of that despair, and through wit, humor, and above all compassion for his characters, he told interesting, thoughtful stories about sometimes very morbid situations. Throughout his works, the most central and enlightening internal conflicts of his protagonists stem from a basic inability to square their physical existence, their wants and needs, with a lofty and ethereal sense of purpose and honor, and an ineffable desire to matter.
As far as I can remember from reading his novels as a teenager, the perfect encapsulation of this conflict occurred when the hero of his 1980 novel The Second Coming retreated into a cave and decided he would stay there, take drugs, and die of starvation unless God showed him authentic Love and made clear to him the point of his rather unfulfilling life. After a relatively short amount of time passes, the hero gets the worst toothache of his life, meekly crawls out of the cave, and drives to the dentist’s office. Of course, I’m not doing justice to the grave humor of the scene, but it speaks to Percy’s ideas about religion, humanity, and that most stoic of concerns, man’s vainglory.
Winston Riley’s documentary, flatly titled though it may be, offers its viewers an interesting, nuanced introduction to the life of a man who so thoroughly explored — perhaps more effectively than any other American writer — human despair and the species’ inability to find meaning in a world that had produced the Third Reich. Robert Coles, Percy’s biographer and a professor of psychology at Harvard, provides some of the most insightful commentary about Percy’s life, as rife with tragedy as it was. Percy liked to refer to himself as an “ex-suicide.” He said this in regard to the fact that both his father and his grandfather had committed suicide as young men, leaving him a legacy of clinical depression and a kind of fucked-up sense of duty and honor. Being raised by his famously stoic and inspiring uncle, Will Percy, young Walker grew up mercurial and, after a brief stint as a physician, began writing essays about language, meaning, and human understanding.
Judging by the severe anguish and intense displacement his characters feel, as well as the tragedy that plagued the men in his family, one might understandably assume that Percy’s personal life mirrored the disordered psyches of his creations. However, his family life was fairly humdrum by most standards. Maybe it was because of his early exposure to sadness and feelings of dislocation, but by the time he married Mary Bernice Townsend, Percy had developed a sense of wonder and deep gratitude for life and his place in it. This juxtaposition between his own thankful, down-to-earth approach to life and his characters’ abstraction and utter sadness provides fertile ground for various theories and approaches that several very-well-spoken pundits take their stabs at. Riley has brought together some very thoughtful writers, artists, and teachers who’ve been influenced by Percy, and while both the insights and the disagreements on his work make a lot more sense to those who have read him, they thankfully resonate with the general concerns of most people interested in 20th Century American Lit. In other words, you can like this without having read the source material.
Percy is a lovingly crafted, if a little underfunded, celebration of one of America’s best storytellers — at least one of its best Southern storytellers, anyway. His understanding of the human condition and his heartfelt yet humorous approach to a human race he considered to be “lost in the cosmos” constituted a remarkably singular voice in American letters. What makes this doc so interesting is its way of showing how quizzically ordered Percy’s life was in comparison to what he wrote. As the man put it so eloquently himself, “Who says I despair? That is to say, I would reverse Kierkegaard’s aphorism that the worst despair is that despair which is unconscious of itself as despair, and instead say that the best despair and the beginning of hope is to be conscious of despair in the very air we breathe, and to look around for something better. I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That’s despair?”
