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The Walker Percy Project

A Descriptive Annotation

Walker Percy: Books of Revelations (Gary M. Ciuba, 1991)

Annotated by Mario Biancalana

Ciuba, Gary M. Walker Percy: Books of Revelations. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991. ix,332.

In Walker Percy: Books of Revelations, Ciuba focuses on Percy's theories of apocalyptic fiction. The first chapter, "To Make All Things New," begins with Percy's own description (from his 1977 self-interview) of Lyn Hill's portrait of him: "a wryly smiling gentleman" stands before another painting that shows "a bombed out place, a place after the end of the world, a no man's island of blasted trees and barbed wire [in which] a window opens onto the sky and sea of a new heaven and earth" (1). Ciuba contends that the figure in the picture within the picture is Percy himself, and the background is the world that the author envisions in his novels, "framing his apocalyptic vision"(l). Ciuba prefaces his discussions of the works of Walker Percy with the argument that Percy looks beyond apocalyptic endings toward the beginning of renewal: "Percy's fiction retells the ancient story of biblical apocalypse in which judgement and destruction culminate in re-creation"(2). Ciuba considers Percy's work especially influenced by the Apocalypse of John.

Chapter two provides an overview of the formative roots of Percy's life: from Columbia University's College of Physicians to the Trudeau Sanatorium in Saranac Lake, New York, from his studies of the existentialists to his devotion to the fiction of Dostoevski, Sartre, Camus, and the like. Ciuba concludes that Percy's vocation of writing rather than healing was a matter of fate.

Ciuba describes Binx Bolling in The Moviegoer, for example, as a man dealing with his own personal apocalypse, offering comparisons to two famous apocalyptic films, Kubrick's Dr. Stranzelove and Kramer's On the Beach. Ciuba considers this first novel most comparable to Percy's own life, the most autobiographical. "By the novel's end," Ciuba claims, "Binx's personal apocalypse finds its fulfillment in eschatological faith" (95).

Ciuba calls Will Barrett in The Last Gentleman a creature of metamorphosis. Baptism consecrates Percy's archetypal act of language; it is the sacrament of naming. Amid the ruins of the ancestral tradition, with names recalling "gentlemen," Will will become "one of the gentle hearted"(130). Ciuba sees Percy exploiting the sacrament of baptism to show the monumental change it can evoke in the common man, saving him from personal apocalypse.

Ciuba sees Lancelot as the culmination of Percy's apocalyptic fiction. "The end that has loomed over Percy's fiction from its very beginning finally explodes and implodes in Lancelot"(171). For Ciuba, this most violent of all Percy's apocalyptic novels "explores the very limits of an already extreme genre"(171).

Books of Revelations is a descriptive journey into Percy's works as well as his life. A writer can only write well about what he knows; faced with an apocalyptic situation in life early on, Percy kept responding to it. There are chapters devoted to all of Percy's novels, including the unpublished novel, The Gramercy Winner. The book concludes with a complete bibliography of primary and secondary sources, and a thorough index of names and ideas.

Prepared as a requirement for Graduate Seminar
John R. May, Professor
Dept. of English
Louisiana State University
(Spring 1997)