Refiner’s Fire: Novels that Diagnose the Culture’s Pathology

Walker Percy stands in the literary tradition of T. S. Eliot and Flannery O’Connor.

The name Walker Percy is unfamiliar to most evangelicals. It is only a little better known among secular scholars. And yet, among those who do know the novels and essays of Walker Percy, he is highly appreciated. He is one of the few Christian writers who can hold the attention of a large secular audience.

Percy should interest evangelicals, for he stands in the Christian-literary tradition of T. S. Eliot and Flannery O’Connor. All three have exposed the sterility of modern secular life and recommended as an alternative the Christian gospel. Further, all three are insightful essayists; taken collectively, their essays make an enlightening commentary on the study of Christianity and literature.

Percy’s first publications were scholarly articles on the philosophy of language, the rootlessness of contemporary life, and the source of racism. Two novels were rejected before he found his natural style in The Moviegoer (1961), winner of the National Book Award in 1962. More followed: The Last Gentleman (1965), Love in the Ruins (1971), The Message in the Bottle (1975, essays), Lancelot (1977), and The Second Coming (1980).

Percy’s commitment to writing and to Christ is a fascinating study. Like C. S. Lewis, Percy went through a long, intellectual struggle with secularism before he became a Christian. Born in 1916 in Birmingham, Alabama, his youth was marred try his father’s suicide when he was 11 and by his mother’s death in an auto accident two years later. He and his two younger brothers were raised by their paternal cousin, Uncle Will Percy, author, friend of Faulkner, lawyer, planter, and civic leader. He guided his youthful cousins with the diligence of a father. The personal philosophy he passed on was stoic and non-Christian: he believed in duty to others, self-sacrifice, and determination to defend truth and goodness, even as the moral walls protecting a civilization, Roman or Southern, crumbled.

Walker Percy came under further secular influence at the University of North Carolina during premedical studies. He went on to Columbia Medical School, and interned as a pathologist at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. Of his education to this point, Percy has said, “My own development … has been a relationship to a … non-Christian humanism.… On the one hand there was science and on the other hand there was art, or play or emotion. I knew that wasn’t right. There had to be a more serious alternative than that.”

From examining the tissues of tubercular patients, Percy contracted the disease: “Then came the cataclysm, brought to pass appropriately enough by one of these elegant agents of disease, the same scarlet tubercle bacillus I used to see lying crisscrossed like Chinese characters in the sputum and lymphoid tissue of the patients at Bellevue. Now I was one of them.”

Two years of confinement in sanatoriums; the reading of existential writers, especially the Christians, Kierkegaard and Marcel; and a deep rethinking of his personal philosophy brought him to make several major changes in his life. He became a Catholic, and he changed his career from medicine to writing.

Concerning his growing unhappiness with secular humanism, he says, “An extraordinary paradox became clear: that the more science progressed and even as it benefited man, the less it said about what it is like to be a man living in the world.… What began to interest me was … the problem of man himself, the nature and destiny of man; specifically and more immediately, the predicament of man in a modern technological society.”

Percy’s essays help us to appreciate his novels. In “Notes for a Novel About the End of the World,” he discusses his role as a Christian novelist. His faith, he says, gives him a clear asset over secular writers. He and the secularists agree that contemporary man feels alienated or homeless, but he believes he knows why: man is estranged from God. One symptom of this estrangement is man’s sense of homelessness, and Percy’s novels amplify his belief in man’s homelessness apart from God. His protagonists feel rootless, displaced, and they search for meaning. As Binx Bolling puts it in The Moviegoer, “though the universe has been disposed of, I myself was left over.”

Binx searches for an authentic way of life that seems to end with his commitment to faith in Christ. Awaking one morning to begin another day as a New Orleans stockbroker, he suddenly realizes his hedonistic life is not satisfying, and he begins a search for something better. “Everydayness” is the symptom of alienation, Binx feels. He is always cheerful, witty, and pleasant, yet he is afraid he “should be lost, cut loose metaphysically speaking.… There is a danger of slipping clean out of space and time.” The richness of The Moviegoer comes from Binx’s ironic commentary: “all the friendly and likeable people seem dead to me; only the haters seem alive.”

Binx’s 14-year-old brother, Lonnie, a deyout Catholic confined to a wheelchair, is the Christian focus of the novel. He tells Binx that he prays for his salvation. When Lonnie dies, Binx seems to conclude his search with a commitment to Christianity.

Percy’s third novel, Love in the Ruins, is the one most outspokenly Christian. The story of Tom More, a nervous, troubled psychiatrist, but a sincere Christian and an avowed opponent of secularism, it is an unrestrained satire of behaviorist psychology, sex research clinics, selfish political conservatives, and naïve liberal protesters.

In presenting the Christian gospel as the solution to alienation, Percy is somewhat reticent, and so he is often misunderstood. Christians often are provoked that he is not more forthright in pointing to Christ.

But Percy believes Christianity restricts a writer with two liabilities: its language is not meaningful to the secular world, and its moral record is offensive to it. The first is the more serious to a writer. Percy believes Christian theological terms are devalued in the world’s ears, and such words as “God,” “sin,” and “salvation” are so commonplace and the ideas they express so defunct to the secular mind, that an evangelist “might just as well be shouting Exxon! Exxon!”

Percy believes the Christian novelist instead must be “cunning and guileful and must use every trick in the bag to achieve his purpose.” Percy is so cunning in depicting his religious commitments novelistically that they are often missed. Nevertheless, if a sincere messenger tells the good news to a modern castaway who has been waiting to hear it, then, says Percy, “the castaway will, by the grace of God, believe him.”

Pathology, Percy’s medical specialty, suits him novelistically as well. He is hesitant to prescribe the Christian cure for alienation, but he is brilliant at describing the nature of the disease.

RICHARDSON GRAYDr. Gray is professor of English at Montreal-Anderson College, Montreal, North Carolina.

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