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The Walker Percy Project

A Descriptive Annotation

Autobiography in Walker Percy: Repetition, Recovery, and Redemption (Edward Dupuy, 1996)

Annotated by David Interrante

Dupuy, Edward. Autobiography in Walker Percy: Repetition, Recovery, and Redemption. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996. xviii, 157 pp.

Dupuy's book consists of a short introduction, four chapters, and a coda. The ideas in the works of Percy structure this study, more than the novels and essays do. Dupuy addresses them as applicable to the ideas, often at length, and in different chapters. Chapter One, "Autobiography, Repetition, and Percy," attempts to lay a groundwork of ideas from which to see Percy's work, beginning with the concept of autobiography and Kierkegaard's notion of repetition. Chapter Two, "Repetition and Autos: The Unformulability of the Self," focuses extensively on Binx Bolling in The Moviegoer and Will Barrett in The Last Gentleman in an attempt to ground "two dimensions of repetition and the unformulability of the self — the openness of the sign and placement in consciousness" (64) in these works. Chapter Three, "Repetition and Bios: Surviving Life in a Century of Gnosticism and Death," spends considerable time on the Holocaust, Jews and The Thanatos Syndrome, with a significant passage on Lancelot. Chapter Four, "Repetition and Graphein: Metaphor and the Mystery of Language and Narrative," deals with The Second Coming. The coda reminds us that Percy attempted to make sense of the self and life through writing. Many of the essays in Message in the Bottle as well as the ideas in the middle section of Lost in the Cosmos are dealt with throughout the book.

Dupuy shows how Percy transforms life and experience into literature, arguing that theories of autobiography are more than applicable to Percy's work. They are what Percy investigated in his fiction and non-fiction. Dupuy makes extensive use of James Olney's ambivalent understanding of autobiography in Metaphors of Self: "I did not think of what I was doing as a study of autobiography; I thought of it as a study of the way experience is transformed into literature (which I suppose could be another way of describing autobiography) — as a study of the creative process, a humanistic study of the ways of men and the forms taken by human consciousness" (3).

Autobiography as a genre came into being concurrently with modernism as a search for identity and definition. Often modernist models presented the life studied as a static force. Rarely was the subject presenting or representing itself in action, or in the process of discovery. Kierkegaard's notion of repetition allowed Percy a way to enter time and defeat that static quality: "It is, in the end, an effort to establish a place for the self that is between ... the polarities of experience that would divorce it from time" (4). In other words, the self searches and creates itself, through time by being part of time.

The bibliography is fuller than "works cited," which are themselves extensive. The index provides a complete list of both names and ideas found in the book.

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