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The Walker Percy Project

A Descriptive Annotation

Plight in Common: Hawthorne and Percy (Elzbieta Olesky, 1993)

Annotated by Kaylene Brummett

Oleksy, Elzbieta. Plight in Common: Hawthorne and Percy. New York: Peter Lang, 1993. vi, 244 pp.

Elzbieta Oleksy's study explores the "plight in common" between Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walker Percy as Percy defines the phrase in The Message in the Bottle:

The modern literature of alienation is in reality the triumphant reversal of alienation through its re-presenting. It is not an existential solution, ... but is an aesthetic victory of comradeliness, a recognition of plight in common. ... As a mode of deliverance from alienation, experiencing it directly is no different from experiencing it through art.(1)

Oleksy begins, in her introduction, by examining similar traumas that shaped the early lives of both authors — for example, confinement due to physical aliments and periods of intense reading. Oleksy also discusses various trends, specifically existentialism, that have informed Percy scholarship over the past four decades. She expands the emphases of critics like Panthea Reid Broughton and Jac Tharpe, noting that until now there has been no thorough analysis of Percy's indebtedness to Hawthorne. The major thrust of the book then takes Tharpe's assertion that "Hawthorne needs reinterpretation in the context of both Western thought and contemporary writing of the American South" (4-5) and applies it to Hawthorne's influence on Percy. The introduction goes a long way in explaining just how Hawthorne and Percy fit together since it is the only point in the book where the two novels she treats in each section are analyzed specifically in terms of one another. The effect is to create a framework for tracing their "shared body of belief" or "plight in common."

Oleksy divides her study into three main parts, titled "Renunciation," "Catharsis," and "Intersubjectivity." Each part contains two chapters and is on average sixty pages long. Part one deals with the existential elements in The Scarlet Letter and The Moviegoer by exploring Tharpe's and Kierkegaard's, and Oleksy's by implication, view of a "goal that vanishes in proportion to the character's proximity to it." "Catharsis" examines Hawthorne's and Percy's respective consideration of sexual matters in what Oleksy calls their middle works — The House of the Seven Gables and Lancelot. The last section of the book discusses The Marble Faun and The Second Coming. Oleksy argues here that the works embody "intersubjective communion" and offer an alternative to "radical" subjectivity. The Second Coming for Oleksy is both Percy's final confrontation with existentialism and his liberation from it. Through these three sections, Oleksy also addresses the issue of women in Percy's fiction. Her approach to gender issues is very balanced in that she does not allow the reader or the critic to confuse the identities of author and character in Percy's fiction.

Plight in Common includes a complete bibliographic listing of Oleksy's secondary sources and an index.

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