Losing to win
The following is an excerpt from Unexpectedly Catholic, out soon from Voyage Comics and Publishing. Deep Down Things contributor Mike Schramm was gracious enough to share a section of his essay on the theme of how loss shaped the writing of Walker Percy.
Winning the national book award for his debut novel, it is an often-told story that when interviewed after The Moviegoer, Walker Percy was asked why it seemed the South produced so many great writers. His answer, “Because we lost the war (Sparrow, Stephen. “Walker Percy: Seer of the Self),” has resonated with Catholics ever since. Mind you, not because Catholics identify with the South or the Confederacy, but first with the idea of being a demonized group in “real America” as Catholics had long been leading up to Percy’s time, but also with the idea of how losing has shaped Christian spirituality and theology.
Regardless of the truth in the maxim “history is written by the victors,” it could very well be followed, according to Percy, with “but literature is written by the vanquished.” One could argue that Percy’s answer is especially true of Southern Catholic writers because of the unique place that “losing” takes on a redemptive role in spirituality.
When I first came across this quote it reminded me of the popular concept in Tolkien studies, “The Long Defeat,” which describes the series of losses the heroes experience, some of whom may never see victory, but participate in the ultimate victory brought about by Tolkien’s concept of Divine Providence, eucatastrophe.
The phrase “long defeat” appears in Galadriel’s speech about Celeborn to the Fellowship in The Lord of the Rings when they are passing through Lorien, fittingly right after they have experienced a profound defeat in their loss of Gandalf (Fellowship of the Ring; “The Mirror of Galadriel”). What these series of defeats create in the protagonist, just as the defeat of the civil war created in the collected consciousness of the South, is the morose melancholia that forces one to reevaluate reality. In reevaluating reality, and one’s own relationship to it, it is no surprise that questions of identity and existence will emerge. It should then surprise no one that Walker Percy is considered one of the foremost Christian existentialist fiction writers in American literature.
A brief note on existentialism and its presence in literature (they seem to lend themselves to each other well, but that is a different essay) both inside and outside the visible bounds of the Church. Existentialism as a philosophical system, as the name denotes, seeks to ask the fundamental, subjective questions of human existence. Of course, asking questions about the nature of humanity has been around since the inception of philosophy, but they have usually been approached by looking outward at the objective realities that form us. With existentialism, we are both the subject asking the question as well as the object in question.
While this system of thinking certainly runs the risk of being self-centered, and many examples of existentialist authors illustrate this, it does not necessarily have to be. There has always been this moving outward and inward in terms of our focus as we reflect upon the effect the outside world has on us, but this will then affect how we act and affect the outside world. Part of what existentialism, at its best, seeks to do is better recognize this relationship.
Walker Percy is considered an existentialist author because of his own biographical influence, especially by the works of Soren Kierkegaard, considered to be the father of Christian existentialism. However, one of the strongest influences in Percy’s conversion to Catholicism was his engagement with Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae (perhaps fittingly, Flannery O’Connor, another Southern, Catholic author who loved examining the uncomfortable darkness of human existence also read Aquinas’s Summa).
Seeing both of these influences converge, Walker Percy was writing during the rise of Thomistic Existentialism, a philosophical movement that sought the answers to those questions of subjective individualism through the lens of the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. We see a lot of these influences in Percy’s first novel, The Moviegoer, and Jack “Binx” Bolling, whose struggle does not reside in looking for money, looking for work, or looking for women, but looking for himself as he meanders through much of the story with seemingly nothing to ground or tether him to anything but the next experience.
Much later in Percy’s career, we see these themes of existentialism brought forth overtly in his satirical self-help book, Lost in the Cosmos. This book, each chapter of which begins with a quiz one would expect to find in a self-help book or section of a popular magazine, was actually written in response to the Cosmos TV series produced by Carl Sagan.
What precisely inspired Percy was the materialistic, atheistic outlook of Sagan’s series and the implications this would have on how humans viewed and understood themselves. Sagan’s Cosmos concluded by showing us that because we now realize how much bigger space is compared to us we should consider ourselves that much less significant. While this might be materially true, Percy rejects the assumption that Sagan made that the material is all that is real.
What Percy’s Cosmos sought to remind us was that we are actually much less known to our own selves than we might realize, and this is because we are actually much bigger than any material universe we eventually discover. As “lost” as one might be in Sagan’s Cosmos, to the degree we do not know ourselves because we ignore the spiritual depths there are within us, one is surely much more “Lost in [Percy’s] Cosmos.”
As Percy showed us in The Moviegoer, Binx is an example of one such person who is “lost” in his own small cosmos until he attaches himself to those fundamental relationships. Binx stops hopping from woman to woman and marries Kate. He pursues his own medical studies, the career that his dad literally “took flight” from and got him killed. Finally, he becomes present to his family in a new way at a climactic moment in one of their lives, an opportunity that would never present itself again, showing his change in priorities and understanding of finality.
Percy is not arguing that one can only break free of this existential wandering by doing the conventional checklist things like getting married and pursuing a stable career. It was more about the intentionality to relationships that Binx finally recognized and prioritized. This is where he found, and where we find, our true identity in existence.
It is in defeat that one is forced to ask the questions identified with the existentialist philosophy. It is also in defeat that one is humbled enough to answer those questions soberly and actually grow from them. The loss that was a part of Percy’s cultural DNA made him, and so many other Southern writers, equipped to ask and answer these questions through their characters.
Because the loss that typifies the Crucifixion, but also paves the way for the Resurrection, was also a part of Percy’s spiritual DNA, he was equipped to recognize the spiritual fruit that would inevitably come from remembering and contemplating this loss.
It is in losing, either the humbling loss of the war or the loss of oneself to the crippling materialism of modernity, that one is confronted with the need to find the self in something transcendent. Perhaps another layer of irony to the Percy quote that began this chapter, is that he also stated he did not want to be known as a “Southern” writer. This was largely due to the prejudice that he, rightly or wrongly, perceived toward Southern writers by the institutional literary societies that were stationed up North. However, there is also likely a level of pigeon-holing he, like any writer, wanted to avoid.
The questions of existentialism are the ones with which Binx in The Moviegoer grapples, they are the ones that Percy asks of us in Lost in the Cosmos, and they are the ones that should be asked by everyone. They are also the very questions to which the answer is found in Christ, who “fully reveals man to himself (Gaudium et Spes, 22).”
