Popular Culture and Intellectual Identity in the Work of Walker Percy Jordan J

Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2006 "The Nature of the Search": Popular Culture and Intellectual Identity in the Work of Walker Percy Jordan J. Dominy Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES “THE NATURE OF THE SEARCH”: POPULAR CULTURE AND INTELLECTUAL IDENTITY IN THE WORK OF WALKER PERCY By JORDAN J. DOMINY A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2006 The members of the Committee approve the Thesis of Jordan J. Dominy defended on April 03, 2006. Andrew Epstein Professor Directing Thesis Darryl Dickson-Carr Committee Member Leigh Edwards Committee Member Approved: Hunt Hawkins, Chair, Department of English The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members. ii For my parents, who have always put my goals ahead of their own iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I thank the members of my Thesis Committee: Dr. Leigh Edwards for helping me initially narrow my focus, Dr. Andrew Epstein for directing my thesis, and Dr. Darryl Dickson-Carr for his advice and interest in the project. I thank my good friends and fellow students, Amber Pearson, Bailey Player, Alejandro Nodarse, and Jennifer Van Vliet for patiently enduring my droning about Walker Percy as I completed this project. Last but not least, I thank my wife, Jessica, for her enduring support and love. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ................................................................................................ vi INTRODUCTION: AN AUTHOR IN TRANSITION....................................... 1 1. CHAPTER 1: MIDCULT IN THE MOVIEGOER ........................................ 6 2. CHAPTER 2: THE SUBVERSION OF PORNOGRAPHY IN LANCELOT 18 3. CHAPTER 3: INTELLECTUALLY LOST IN THE COSMOS...................... 31 4. CONCLUSION............................................................................................... 45 ENDNOTES ................................................................................................ 46 REFERENCES ................................................................................................ 48 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .............................................................................. 51 v ABSTRACT In this thesis, I argue that the works of Walker Percy present a progression from passive to active attitudes toward popular and mass culture and that understanding this progression brings a new perspective to the relationship between intellectuals and popular culture in mid-to- late-twentieth century American literature. I discuss two of Percy’s novels, The Moviegoer and Lancelot, and a book of non-fiction satire and parody, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. The first chapter addresses The Moviegoer. In it, I argue that its protagonist, Binx Bolling, deals with the encroaching mass culture of American suburbia of the 1950’s by combining the best of both his high and low culture identities into a midcult one, a term defined by Andrew Ross and originally discussed by Dwight MacDonald, a contemporary of Percy. The novel’s mere promise of happiness at it’s conclusion reflects an ambivalent attitude toward popular culture and the midcult on Percy’s part. The second chapter explores the ways in which Lance Lamar, the protagonist of Lancelot, violently subverts popular culture’s media by videotaping his wife’s acts of infidelity and murdering her lover. I also relate Andrew Ross’s discussion of pornography’s proliferation in mass media in the late 1960’s and 1970’s and the implications it has for Lance’s anger towards the film company filming an all-but pornographic film at his ancestral home. Lance’s violent reactions certainly reflect a changing attitude for Percy, who is more wary of the open sexuality in popular culture, but certainly does not advocate the violent revolution that his protagonist does. The final chapter reflects yet another change in Percy’s attitude towards popular culture with Lost in the Cosmos. Rather than choosing fiction, he addresses his concerns with his own voice, albeit with parody, caricature, and satire. But beyond ridiculing popular culture, he recognizes the ways in which intellectuals are susceptible to its influence as well and how this makes the existence of Andrew Ross’s “new intellectual” who can speak to both the academic vi and popular sphere a near impossibility. Ultimately, the resolution of the conflict between intellectuals and popular culture lies with individuals. vii INTRODUCTION: AN AUTHOR IN TRANSITION A black and white photograph taken during the middle 1930s in Chapel Hill, North Carolina shows an assembly of moviegoers waiting in line to get inside a theatre.1 Most of the figures in the photograph have their backs turned towards the camera; a couple of others look towards the camera. One young man, however, looks directly into the camera’s lens, his hands shoved into his pockets and his left leg extended outward from the line as if to strike a noticeable, perhaps even comic pose. This moviegoer standing so different from the others standing in line is Walker Percy (1916-1990). At the time of this photograph, he was a pre-med student at the University of North Carolina who managed to find time for movies alongside his studies. The writer Percy would become twenty years later—after his career as a physician was halted by a tuberculosis infection—always strikes the same pose he did during his college years: as an individual who realizes he is but one in a line of others attempting to buy a fleeting moment’s happiness in an increasingly troubling century. Throughout his career, Percy persistently turned to the issues of popular and mass culture, how their forces lead individuals to lead boring, materialistic lives or to seek validation through popular media (especially film), and how the one person who shows out in line might rise above those influences. Considering the writer the young man in the photograph becomes, perhaps Percy was aware early in life of the possibility of a homogenous culture of followers led by the shepherds of mass culture—radio, cinema, and television, for example. If the critique of popular culture is important to consider in understanding Percy’s fiction, then it is interesting to note that it is a topic largely overlooked by Percy scholars. Most prefer to engage his novels in the light of their existentialist and religious themes. Percy was greatly influenced by Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, and Marcel, all philosophers whom he read during his convalescence in New Mexico in the 1940s. He also converted to Catholicism during that decade, and became more and more unabashedly Catholic as he grew older. Later in life when asked to contribute an essay called “Why Are You Catholic” to a collection of essays by writers about philosophy and religion, he 1 states simply near the beginning of the essay, “The reason I am a Catholic is that I believe that what the Catholic Church proposes is true” (304). These inclinations in his work are difficult to ignore, and a rich body of criticism that reads Percy’s work in relation to his philosophical and religious beliefs has emerged. Critics have always been conscious of his diagnosis of a “malaise” in the modern world and been aware of the “search” on which all of Percy’s protagonists find themselves, and generally this search is equated with a religious or philosophical quest. I propose in this thesis, though, that the searching in Percy’s work extends beyond these thoroughly discussed themes to include a search for identity within and among the mass media that floods the experience of mid-twentieth century Americans. I argue that Walker Percy’s work is worth considering in the context of popular culture because it provides a unique progression in the way an individual’s understanding of the self in the face of the proliferation of mass media becomes a greater and greater crisis during the transition from the mid-to-late twentieth century. He is a distinctive figure in twentieth century American literature for two reasons. Firstly, Percy’s literary career spans the transition from the period of late-modernism into post-modernism. His career began after the Cold War had been underway for nearly two decades, and his work emerged in a literary and intellectual climate that was troubled by the ways in which Americans grew startlingly homogenous in the face of Communism. In his book, American Fiction in the Cold War, Thomas Schaub documents the ways in which American intellectuals were forced to unite towards the political center to fend off the McCarthy witch- hunts of the 1950s. Moreover, Schaub explores how literary critics were obsessed with the ways in which the contemporary American novel represented and commented upon the social history of the times. Percy’s early oeuvre, especially The Moviegoer, which will be discussed at length in chapter one, certainly fits into such a critical framework with its incisive social commentary on issues of the midcult. The novel asks the same question about 1950’s suburbia that Richard Pells tells us that intellectuals of the day asked: “Americans had built a utopia on earth, beyond the most extravagant dreams of Marxists and liberals. Why, then, did the results seem so hollow? Why did the rewards of affluence fail to satisfy” (189)? The

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