A Crusader Against Despair: Walker Percy at 35 (Word on Fire)
A preview of my recent article on Word on Fire's Evangelization & Culture Online commemorating the legacy of the great Southern Catholic writer and philosopher Walker Percy.
This is a preview of an essay I wrote for Word on Fire’s Evangelization & Culture Online remembering the spiritual and intellectual contributions of the Southern Catholic novelist and philosopher Walker Percy, who passed away in 1990. It’s no secret to my readers that Percy is a hero of mine (the very title of this publication, The Wayfarer, was inspired by several of his essays). This article is my most concentrated attempt thus far to articulate why he matters in this particular cultural moment from the Catholic perspective, especially for young men like myself who feel the weight of the crisis of meaninglessness facing the postmodern West. You may read the full article for free by clicking the button below.
I discovered Walker Percy at a time in my life when I was searching with immense urgency and anxiety for my place in a new, turbulent, adult world, which had assaulted me so abruptly after college. Call it what it was: a quarter-life crisis. I did not know who I was, what I stood for, or what I wanted to do with my life. I was a year into a journalism job but was starting to sour of it and didn’t know what else to do for a living. Moreover, I had just made up my mind (somewhat feebly) to become Catholic and was preparing to get married to my now wife in six months. So much change lay ahead of me. Most of it was positive change, but with it, there was also great uncertainty.
In The Moviegoer, Percy’s first published novel, which won him the National Book Award in 1962, I discovered a protagonist—Binx Bolling—fraught with the same “modern malaise” that afflicted me so deeply at the time. Stuck in an endless pattern of diversions from making money to pursuing women to, of course, watching movies, Binx lives in the sterile suburbs of 1950s New Orleans, though he remains haunted by the strict expectations of Stoic honor imposed on him by his old Southern genteel family—namely, his Aunt Emily. Yet neither the aesthetic mode of his suburban bachelor lifestyle nor the ethical mode of his Aunt Emily offers any feasible solution to his detachment and meaninglessness. Thus, Binx embarks on a “Search” for an alternative. What he arrives at is something in the trajectory of the religious mode: a firm commitment to everydayness. He seeks to uncover meaning in the ordinary and the familiar instead of chasing after it in perpetual newness or grandiose heroic gestures. He calls this solution “the Little Way,” which differs from the various versions of “The Big Search for the Big Happiness” propounded to him by the consumer culture and his aunt. Binx decides to leave the realm of pure possibility and get married, thereby embracing responsibility and commitment.
Though the book does not end with Binx explicitly converting to Christianity, Percy explained that he meant the book to be “a modest restatement of the Judeo-Christian notion that man is more than an organism in an environment, more than an integrated personality, more even than a mature and creative individual.” Rather, “he is a wayfarer and a pilgrim.”1
Percy’s other novels—which range from dystopian satires about insane psychiatrists engineering contraptions to mend the world’s spiritual qualms to existential romances about an amnesiac Mississippian’s odyssey around the United States with a terminally ill teen—often conclude on a similar note: a firm affirmation in favor of the everyday and the often overlooked commitments that accompany it.
L.W. Blakely is a writer in Birmingham, Alabama. He is the author of The Wayfarer, a newsletter where he publishes literary fiction, criticism, and musings. Learn more about L.W. and The Wayfarer on the About page, or (if you’ve enjoyed what you’ve read) consider subscribing and sharing his work.