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The Walker Percy Project

A Descriptive Annotation

The Fiction of Walker Percy (John Edward Hardy, 1987)

Annotated by Luke Vassiliou

Hardy, John Edward. The Fiction of Walker Percy. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1987. 317 pp.

John Edward Hardy's The Fiction of Walker Percy deals mainly with the six novels of Walker Percy, although the introductory chapter briefly discusses some of Percy's essays. Hardy comments on Percy's idea that man is homo symbolificus, a position that Percy has supported from "'Symbol as Need' in 1954 to Lost in the Cosmos in 1983" (13). Hardy explains how important for Percy was the idea of human language transactions as "essentially 'triadic' events," yet asserts that Percy will be remembered mainly as a novelist, not as an essayist or philosopher.

After this introductory chapter, a chapter is allotted to each novel from The Moviegoer through The Thanatos Syndrome (the publication of which Hardy awaited before completing his book). Hardy insists that he will not pursue the line of inquiry of biographical criticism, but instead seeks to treat each "single novel as a work of art" (1). Thus even though, for instance, in the chapter on The Moviegoer he sees Binx's search as "obviously including that of the inevitable 'father search'" (34), Hardy avoids bringing in biographical information to explain the character's quest. Hardy does not avoid biographical implications altogether, however. In the chapter on The Second Coming, for example, he includes a complicated argument to explain his position that the Roman Catholic church is actually present through its conspicuous absence, and it is apparent that it is not only the framework of Percy's work as a whole that leads Hardy to such a conclusion but also his knowledge of Percy's conversion to Catholicism.

Hardy discusses each novel in terms of the characters' psychological make-up, the religious-philosophical issues raised in the novel, and the literary allusions included. He is careful not to make too much of these allusions, however, explaining that they can often mislead the reader or oversimplify the novel's content (a danger that Hardy believes is present especially in Lancelot with its Arthurian allusions). Hardy is particularly interested in the female characters and even though he finds Allison Huger in The Second Coming "the best evidence that Percy has at least tried to improve his understanding of women," he states that Percy's world by and large offers "little comfort" to the concerns of feminists and "avowed homosexuals" (21).

In addition to endnotes, the book contains both a bibliography and an index. Among his sources Hardy acknowledges special indebtedness to William Allen's "work on the intellectual biography [of Walker Percy]" (24), specifically the parts about the influences of American writers on Percy's work.

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