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The Walker Percy Project

A Descriptive Annotation

The Writer as Shaman: The Pilgrimages of Conrad Aiken and Walker Percy (Ted R. Spivey, 1986)

Annotated by Christina Vallery

Spivey, Ted R. The Writer as Shaman: The Pilgrimages of Conrad Aiken and Walker Percy. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1986. xiv, 194 pp.

Ted Spivey's book springs from the idea that both Aiken and Percy developed a "mature wisdom" through their "continual relating of the arts and sciences to the insights of religion" (xi). This process, coupled with their shared experience of alienation from "the early trauma of parental suicide," resulted in their personal and literary preoccupation with the pilgrimage (xii). Spivey proposes to discuss Aiken and Percy on four fronts: their unity of science, art and God; their unity of life and work; their overcoming alienation; and their recovery of the role of the man of letters. His purpose is to prove that "as writers who put the concept of pilgrimage at the center of their lives and works Aiken and Percy achieved in time the status of modern shamans" (xiii).

The book is organized into eight chapters, which explore the full span of Aiken's and Percy's writings (excluding Percy's The Thanatos Syndrome, published in 1987). Chapter I provides a brief historical summary of "The Split between Science and Art" and then parallels the life events, mental traumas and experiences, education and influences, and the resulting creative pursuits of both Aiken and Percy. Chapter II explores how both authors could only gradually repossess the love of their parents by reconciling violence and "family sickness" in the urban setting of their respective childhoods (21). Chapter III studies Aiken's and Percy's "Long Apprenticeship" to science, philosophy and literary art. Studying their greatest influences, Spivey shows how they established a "philosophical approach to language and communication," developed a world vision, overcame alienation, and successfully reconciled the past with the present for the sake of a future. Chapter IV explores the works Spivey sees as indicative of "the period of early maturity before 40" (83). Spivey sees their use of the idea of pilgrimage to identify, explore, surpass, and dismiss their feelings both of "narcissism and a strong inherited death wish" as crucial to their appeal to intersubjectivity in the transcendental tradition as a way to extend the significance of the pilgrimage (83).

Chapter V examines "the period of middle age between 40 and the late 50's" in which apocalyptic subject and symbol are used both to "announce [the] restoration of paradise" and to "prepare humanity for the emergence of a new and better world" (83, 111). Chapter VI explores the "period of summing up" — life after 60 — in which the "expansion of consciousness," the "discovery of love and joy," the discovery of grace, and the renewal of the meaning of life are all revealed as "fruits" of the pilgrimage (83, 139-40). The final two chapters recapitulate Spivey's thesis. By fulfilling shamanistic roles, Spivey concludes, Aiken and Percy have provided "practical insights into ways in which the artistic imagination, the ethical will, and the scientific intelligence can work together" (185).

Though the book includes an adequate general index, it lacks a bibliography.

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