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The Walker Percy Project

A Descriptive Annotation

The Language of Grace: Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and Iris Murdoch (Peter Hawkins, 1983)

Annotated by Jennifer Bosworth

Hawkins, Peter. The Language of Grace: Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and Iris Murdoch. Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1983. xiv, 137 pp.

The Language of Grace focuses on the writings of Walker Percy as well as those of Flannery O'Connor and Iris Murdoch. The Percy chapter, which comes between the O'Connor and Murdoch chapters, examines the depiction of moments of grace in five novels — Lancelot, The Last Gentleman, Love in the Ruins, The Moviegoer, and The Second Coming — and in The Message in the Bottle.

In the first chapter, "Strategies of Grace," Hawkins explains that all three writers use parables to force the reader into a better understanding of self. To aid this understanding, they "share a penchant for the shattering of the status quo as a prelude to transformation" (17). Only through this "shattering of the status quo" can individuals achieve grace. Hawkins sees the modern world, and individual existence within it, as "shallow and impoverished" and lacking in a language to understand the "realities that transcend our current theories" (10). The rejection of faith in favor of reason alone is due partly to the inability of language to connect individuals to the experience of grace.

Hawkins explores the breakdown of communication and its resulting alienation in the Walker Percy chapter. The "devaluation of Christian language" (13) bars Percy's characters from hearing the Good News of Christianity. This failure of modern language leads to characters' finding it "impossible to believe in the reality of what cannot be seen or quantified" and thus to an "elimination [of] the individual's hunger and thirst for God from the realm of serious consideration" (55).

Hawkins theorizes that Percy's use of the disastrous to force characters, and readers, into readiness to accept moments of grace works because it breaks "the hold of the objective-empirical upon a person's consciousness" (56). It is only then that characters are open to an acknowledgment of God and the Good News. Until the disastrous occurs, Percy's characters are trapped in a two-dimensional contemporary society devoid of religion. Hawkins postulates that the distance and the alienation that Percy's characters experience parallel the distance created between the reader and the text. Percy's use of language and satire allows for a "distancing from the normal [that] will serve to unite the reader with the protagonist in that character's sense of disorientation and malaise" (64). The resulting recognition of the absurdity of life opens the door to Christianity.

The Language of Grace has neither an index nor a formal bibliography. There are, however, notes to each chapter containing requisite bibliographical information.

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