The Unholy Grail in Walker Percy's Lancelot C. E. Smith

THE UNHOLY GRAIL IN WALKER PERCY'S LANCELOT C. E. SMITH Los Angeles the beginning of Walker Percy's fourth novel, Lancelot, the title Atcharacter finds himself confined in an insane asylum, unsure of exact- ly how he got there. Seeing his old friend Percival, who is both a Catholic priest and a psychiatrist, somehow cures his supposed amnesia. Lancelot explains how the discovery of his wife's infidelity drove him to murder her, her lover, and a group of their friends. As he remembers the horrific events of his past, he reveals his apocalyptic plans for the future, plans that involve nothing less than the violent cleansing of the sexual immorality of Western culture. In short, he intends to start the equivalent of a third world war. Percival's two vocations make Lancelot's narrative a confession of two kinds: a Catholic one, and a psychoanalytic one. As Patrick Samway illustrates in his painstaking biography, Percy took particular interest in psychiatry and in Catholicism: he was a medical doctor turned Catholic writer. Up until the discovery of his wife Margot's unfaithfulness, Lancelot has lived the quiet and uneventful life of a southern aristocrat. One day while reading in his renovated pigeonnier, he glances by chance at a document which contains his seven year old daughter's blood type. He is curious to see that he and his daughter cannot possibly be related, and he concludes naturally that Margot has been unfaithful. The discovery jolts him out of his daily routine - like one of Binx Bolling's "rotations" in The Moviegoer - and sends him on a maniacal but calculated quest to discover the true nature of sin. By a series of empirical deductions, he determines that his daughter's father is most likely a member of Margot's movie company, which happens to be filming at his house, Belle Isle. He becomes obsessed with seeing the adultery first hand, so he installs a video surveillance system and makes a movie of his own. Once he has attained unquestionable proof of her infidelity, he cuts her lover's throat and blows up Belle Isle along with most of the movie company. By some miracle of physics, the explosion propels him to safety. Of all his novels, Lancelot is Percy's darkest. Kieran Quinlan, the author of Walker Percy: The Last Catholic Novelist, asserts that while writing the novel Percy was having doubts about his Catholic faith, doubts which man- ifested themselves in an uncharacteristic absence from Mass and in exces- sive drinking (154-155). Quinlan argues that Percy was disgruntled over certain upheavals in the Catholic Church, particularly the unofficial and radical speculation as to the nature of the Eucharist and the difference between "transubstantiation" and "transignification." It is surprising that what seems to be merely an issue of semantics would cause a spiritual crisis in the author's life so profound as to be noted in a biography. (Samway omits this biographical connection - either because of his own religious bias, or because of a simple lack of evidence.) If such a crisis did occur, if the author's attendance at church did change drastically around the time he was writing Lancelot, it would no doubt help to explain the all too con- vincing stoicism and rage of the novel's title character. And the subtle change in the Church's lexicon - a change the Church never officially endorsed - would in fact have a significant impact on Percy and his novel, but not for the reasons that Quinlan implies. Quinlan notes one very interesting circumstance related to the composition of the novel: Percy's office adjoined that of a young woman with whom he forged a close relationship (155). An artist named Lyn Hill, she later painted a portrait of the author which he described as "a kind of com- posite of the protagonists of my novels, but most especially Lancelot. He is not too attractive a fellow and something of a nut besides."1 It is important to note here Percy's identification with his character, an identification that implies Lyn Hill was familiar with a darker side of the author. Percy hoped the portrait would appear on the back cover of Lancelot (Samway 336). As an occupant of the adjacent office, Lyn Hill was a constant presence during the composition of the novel. She was no doubt the prototype of Anna, the character in the novel who occupies the cell adjacent to Lancelot's. Samway also remarks on the relationship of the author and his neighbor, describing how the two would communicate by tapping on the walls (325). The novel is a dialogue between Lancelot and his confidant, Percival. Both names allude to the King Arthur legend, in which the knights Percival and Lancelot seek the Holy Grail. In many ways the novel is an inversion of that legend. The title character is not the reluctant seducer of the king's wife, but the one who is betrayed. Margot's first lover - and most likely the father of his daughter - bears the name Merlin, the powerful magician of Camelot. But Percy's Merlin is a movie actor, possessed of no magical pow- ers or outstanding qualities except for whatever he might exhibit on the movie screen. The Arthurian legend traditionally shows how adultery caused the fall of Camelot. But in the novel, the adultery of his wife alerts Lancelot to the possibility of a recovery of Camelot. Lancelot believes that to witness the sin first hand, actually to see it, will somehow grant him an 386 .

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