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The Walker Percy Project

A Descriptive Annotation

Walker Percy: An American Search (Robert Coles, 1978)

Annotated by Mary Jane Reed Gaudet

Coles, Robert. Walker Percy: An American Search. Boston: Little, Brown, 1978. xx, 250 pp.

"To be onto something" — Walker Percy's often quoted words reflecting the constant necessity of "the search" — is exactly what Robert Coles is about in Walker Percy: An American Search, an excellent resource for understanding the philosophical roots of Percy's early essays and his first four novels — The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman, Love in the Ruins, and Lancelot.

Coles, Harvard psychiatrist and author of the five-volume Children of Crisis, states that his book is "a mixture: biography, literary analysis, and a 'response' in Gabriel Marcel's sense of the word — an act of 'fidelity' to a writer by an admiring reader."

The first of the book's three sections, entitled "Philosophical Roots," sheds light on the dialectic tensions that exerted a strong early influence on Percy. Chief among Percy's forbearers were the Danish philosopher and religious thinker Soren Kierkegaard and the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel. Kierkegaard knew the "leap of faith" he preached involved extreme loneliness, continuing personal anguish and, most significantly, an encounter with the "absurd." To Kierkegaard, unlike Hegel, the German philosopher with whom Coles compares and contrasts Kierkegaard, the issue was not what the mind did but the purpose to which a particular life has been put. Marcel found God revealed in the everyday struggles each of us wages for a kind of personal integrity. He saw anxiety connected to vulnerability, loneliness, hopelessness, and despair. Yet for him there was the possibility of transcendence through man's becoming more than he dreamed despite his limitations of body, mind, and spirit.

In section two, Coles reviews Percy's life and his essays. He traces the history of the Percy family back to Charles Percy, who settled in Wilkinson County, Mississippi in 1776, and Percy's own life into the 1970s. Coles also examines the progression of Percy's writings, revealing his sense of humor about people and their foibles, his capacity for social satire, and his interest in taking seriously what others take for granted or ignore. Weaving us through Percy's numerous essays, in particular "Symbol as Hermeneutic in Existentialism," "The Man on the Train" and "The Coming Crisis in Psychiatry," Coles elaborates on Percy's central concerns — the symbol as a beginning of man's distinctive self; intersubjectivity and shared reflection; one's reaching out to another and rejoicing when the appeal is successful, what Marcel called "the communion of selves;" the mystery of man's situation in this world; and "everydayness" as the enemy.

In the third section, faithful to his original point of exposing the philosophical roots of Percy's work, Coles presents analyses of Percy's first four novels — with the central protagonists revealed as anguished pilgrims, upper-class, existentially haunted, aloof toward themselves, sardonic about their own and others' situations.

Though the book lacks a bibliography, the index is thorough and extremely detailed.

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