Shattered Masculinity and Violence in Walker Percy's Lancelot

Pivot is published through Open Journal Systems (OJS) at York University Shattered Masculinity and Violence in Walker Percy’s Lancelot: Apocalypse Now Rachel Van Hofwegen Willis Abstract: Although it is not one of Walker Percy’s most popular novels, Lancelot is certainly one of his most complicated. Critics such as Simone Vauthier and Maria Hebert have discussed the masculinity of protagonist Lancelot Lamar in depth, building on theories linking Lamar’s shattered masculinity to male homosocial behaviour, particularly the homosocial relationships between Lamar and Merlin and Lamar and Percival. Critical discussions leave out, however, an exploration of the violence that pervades the entire text. This is problematic because Lamar’s dissatisfaction with the homosocial roles in the triangulated relationships created by his wife’s affair is what sparks his obsession with violence as a cleansing act. His wife’s lover is not manly enough for Lamar, shattering Lamar’s sense of masculinity and enraging him. As the narrative progresses, it becomes filled with his vision for the future – a world brought on by the apocalypse where women are sexually pure and men are “pure in heart.” Lamar clearly regards violence as the only way to restore the patriarchal order that his experience of triangulated relationships has thwarted. The protagonist of Walker Percy’s 1977 novel Lancelot is Lancelot Andrewes Lamar, an unreliable narrator telling his story from inside a mental institution, and his jumbled narrative weaves back and forth between the present and the past. In the present, he tells his story to his childhood friend Percival: the story he tells hinges on the infidelity of his wife, Margot, and a subsequent awakening of sorts that leads him to blow up the family home, thereby killing Margot; her lover, Jacoby; and two other actors in the film that movie director Bob Merlin is making at Belle Isle. This destruction, however, does not seem to satisfy Lamar; as he tells Percival his story, his narrative becomes filled with asides regarding his vision for the future – a world where the “best of women will be what we used to call ladies[.] […] The men? The best of them will be strong and brave and pure of heart, not for Christ’s sake, but like an Apache youth or a Lacedemonian who denies himself to be strong” (165). In this vision, Lamar’s main requirement for women is sexual purity, that which makes them, in his estimation, “ladies.” But 98 Shattered Masculinity and Violence in Walker Percy’s Lancelot: Apocalypse Now Pivot 6.1 men have other responsibilities, and these responsibilities betray a preoccupation with hegemonic masculinity’s valorization of strength, dominance, and discipline – what he refers to as being “pure of heart.” In other words, even after the destruction of his family home, Lamar desires to further pursue violence in order to return the world to a place where gender identity and gender roles are clearly delineated, and he plans a kind of apocalypse in order to restore America to this patriarchal order. In my assessment, however, Lamar’s homosocial bonds with other men spur his use of violence in the first place, and this violence does not re- masculinize him per his expectations. This is the reason that he seeks to reaffirm his homosocial bond with old friend Harry Percival while casting an ever more violent vision for the future, never realizing, as will Percival, that this violence will always undermine his gender identity though purporting to reinforce it. In his murderous destruction of Belle Isle and his vision of apocalypse, Lamar is in line with one prevailing principle about violence: that men are overwhelmingly responsible for committing it. Michael Kimmel observes in his book Angry White Men that the “one single intractable gender difference that holds across virtually all societies is that the overwhelming majority – in the range of 90 percent – of the world’s violence is committed by men” (120). In support of this, Francis Beesley and James McGuire, in an article in Psychology, Crime and Law, found a correlation between violent crime offence and high scores on a hypermasculinity index. Often associated with machismo, hypermasculinity is an over-emphasis of masculine ideals such as “physical strength or power, aggressiveness, risk-taking, emotional control, and sexual potency” (Beesley and McGuire 251). The prevalence of this maschismo leads men and boys to be overly concerned with control, power, and dominance, so that socialization in hypermasculinity begins early. However, hypermasculinity and machismo are not born in a vacuum. They are, of course, socially constructed ideals, and the study of masculinities explains a great deal about how these ideals are created and reinforced within cultures. 99 Shattered Masculinity and Violence in Walker Percy’s Lancelot: Apocalypse Now Pivot 6.1 In the early days of gender theory, patriarchy and hegemony became buzzwords in relation to masculinity, but the monolithic nature of these two terms tends to elide the possibility of non-hegemonic and non-patriarchal masculinities. Now, however, theorists such as James Messerschmidt agree that hegemonic masculinity is not a stable discourse on manhood but, rather, a fluid concept that changes based on time and place: “In fact, hegemonic masculinity is the dominant form of masculinity to which other types of masculinity are subordinated, not eliminated, and it provides the primary basis for relationships among men” (130). In other words, where there is a hegemonic masculinity – a discourse about manhood that dominates cultural perceptions of masculinity – there are also other non-hegemonic masculinities that are subordinated but never fully repressed or eliminated. Often, these competing discourses are associated with certain economic class, racial or ethnic origin, and sexuality. And, occasionally, as in the case of the evolution of British “manliness,” forces combine to subvert the dominant gender ideal with one that had been formerly repressed.1 However, despite these competing (and sometimes repressed) ideals, hegemonic masculinity remains the primary premise upon which gender identity is established, and men and boys are thus pressured to navigate its pre-existing conventions and expectations. That men must either conform to or transgress gender expectations in their navigation of hegemonic masculinity leads theorists to acknowledge both the fluidity of gender identity as well as gender’s thoroughgoing performativity. This is the basis for my discussion of Lamar in Percy’s Lancelot, who commits violence in an attempt to re-establish a masculine identity that has been undermined. Sociologists agree that violence is primarily committed by men, yet, in studies of masculinities in literature, the connection between violence and 1 A number of theorists, including Kimmel, have traced the shifting valorization of masculinity towards an exteriorized emphasis on hard bodies and physical discipline. This kind of masculinity, however, recognized by many as the dominant version of manhood today, was once viewed as subordinate to the formerly dominant iteration of manliness that emphasized the wealthy, aristocratic version of manhood prominent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 100 Shattered Masculinity and Violence in Walker Percy’s Lancelot: Apocalypse Now Pivot 6.1 manhood has been surprisingly under-discussed. In American literature, male characters have utilized violence to police others’ masculinity and to perform their own manhood in a variety of situations; a closer look at the body of American literature shows characters using aggression in a manner consistent with this idea. Indeed, some of the most famous works in the American literary tradition – from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, to Ernest Hemingway’s body of work, to Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club – include characters who famously deploy violence in an attempt to restore some part of a masculine role they feel they are unable to perform. In his discussion of nineteenth-century male writers in Manhood and the American Renaissance, David Leverenz argues that these authors’ “best work takes fire from complex feelings about male rivalry for dominance” (5). He, too, points out that “any intensified ideology of manhood is a compensatory response to fears of humiliation” (4). This tradition in the American literary canon of hypermasculine male characters is continued and intensified in American literature of the twentieth century, where male characters utilize male homosociality as a way of policing their own manhood. Michael S. Allen, in “Male Bonding in American Literature,” notes that the American canon is “obsessed with male identity, power, purpose, and bonding” (26). His fascinating argument claims that American male writers essentially created and reinforced the ideal of male bonding, which serves the purpose of protecting men from violence – while simultaneously begetting more violence. He ties the threat of violence (and its corollary, male bonding) to anxiety over masculine identity (26–27), and I believe this relationship highlights how cultures socialize men to police each other’s performances of masculinity in ways that ultimately lead to violent behaviour. A closer look at Lancelot finds a male character committing violence in a manner consistent with these principles. I argue that, in Percy’s novel, elements of homosocial performance and triangulation lead Lancelot Lamar to commit an act of aggression in order to recuperate his ability to fulfil a masculine ideal. Ultimately, however, his violence 101 Shattered Masculinity and Violence in Walker Percy’s Lancelot: Apocalypse Now Pivot 6.1 fails to restore his shattered manhood, and Lamar must decide whether to continue pursuing the masculine code to which he has subscribed or to adapt to a new one. Although it is not Percy’s best-known work, Lancelot still retains critical interest as, in Michael Kobre’s estimation, “Percy’s most complicated book” (165). Critics such as Kobre tend to read the novel as an expression of “the conflict in [Percy’s] own writing between the dialogic novelist and the moralist,” as well as “the dangers of moral zeal” (167).

Load more