Abstract
Early in Walker Percy’s 1980 novel The Second Coming, one of the two main characters, a young woman named Allison, starts to recover her identity by reading notes to herself.2 This is not only a metaphoric looking for the self; Allison has just escaped from a mental institution following her latest electro-shock treatment and she sits on a bench on the main street of a North Carolina town, literally not knowing who she is, as a result of the jolts to her brain cells. But she has prepared for this situation, just as she prepared for her flight, by writing a series of elaborate instructions to herself. For example: ‘Go down the hill to K-Mart and Good’s Variety. Buy clothes and articles (see list below). Go back up hill to Gulf station. Change clothes in restroom. Check into Mitchell’s Triple-A motel one block east. Don’t worry about not having car or suitcase. You will have knapsack and they’re used to it. Pay in advance. Check your driver’s license to be sure you remember your name. Sometimes I, you, forget after a buzz’ (38).
We all fall. This hand here falls.
And look at others: it’s in everyone.
And yet there’s one who holds this falling
infinitely gently in his hands.1
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Notes
From Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Herbst’, in Dos Buch der Bilder, Sämtliche Werke, I (Wiesbaden: Insel Verlag, 1955), p. 400. The translation is my own. Wir alle fallen. Diese Hand da fällt. Und sieh dir andre an: es ist in allen. Und doch ist Einer, welcher dieses Fallen unendlich sanft in seinen Händen hält.
Walker Percy, The Second Coming (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980). Page numbers of the text from which quotations are taken are given in parentheses following the citation. Percy’s other novels published to date are The Moviegoer (1960), The Last Gentleman (1966), Love in the Ruins (1971), Lancelot (1977), and The Thanatos Syndrome (1987). Williston Bibb ‘Will’ Barrett is the young protagonist of The Last Gentleman, and his lover there is Kitty Vaught, the woman who would become, in the plot of The Second Coming, Allison’s mother. But The Second Coming is in no significant way a sequel to The Last Gentleman.
Walker Percy, ‘The Diagnostic Novel: On the Uses of Modern Fiction’, Harper’s, vol. 272/1633 (June, 1986) p. 43.
Patrick H. Samway, ‘An Interview with Walker Percy’, America, vol. 154/5 (15 February, 1986) p. 122.
Paul Ricoeur, Fallible Man, tr. Charles Kelbley (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1965).
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trs John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962). I am indebted to Gregory Tropea’s fine study, Religion, Ideology, and Heidegger’s Concept of Tailing (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986), for guidance through Heidegger’s writing on falling.
David Halliburton, Edgar Allan Poe: A Phenomenological View (Princeton University Press, 1973).
Cf. Martin Heidegger, ‘Language in the Poem: A Discussion on Georg Trakl’s Work’, in his On the Way to Language, tr. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). I do not mean to suggest that Heidegger himself necessarily exemplified a matured intimacy in his personal relationships. As Elisabeth Young-Bruehl describes it in Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), Heidegger’s affair with Hannah Arendt when she was his eighteen-year-old student in Marburg reveals him as vulnerable to the romantic clichés that typify the kind of infatuation he criticizes. Thus Heidegger in 1949 could confess to his wife that ‘Hannah Arendt had been the “passion of his life” and the inspiration of his work’ (Young-Bruehl, p. 247).
Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, trs Frank A. Capuzzi and J. Glenn Gray, in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977) p. 240. I am grateful to James D. Tichenor for pointing out this quotation to me and for the guidance of his doctoral dissertation, The Wave of Transcendence in Faulkner’s Narratives: A Heideggerian Interpretation (Emory University, 1984), for my comments on intimacy in Heidegger’s thought.
Herbert Spiegelberg, ‘On the “I-am-me” Experience in Childhood and Adolescence’, Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, vol. 4/1 (Winter, 1964) pp. 3–21. Richard M. Zaner has a valuable discussion of this experience in ‘Awakening: Towards a Phenomenology of the Self, in F. J. Smith (ed.), Phenomenology in Perspective (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970) pp. 174ff. Percy himself, not incidentally, has contributed essays to journals such as Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
Walker Percy, The Message in a Bottle (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975).
Geoffrey H. Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980).
Since Barrett’s perspective dominates The Second Coming and sometimes produces a patronizing attitude toward Allison, the naive young woman, it should be stressed that Barrett learns at least as much from her, and has his life changed by her, as she learns from and is transformed by him. Something of what he experiences is explained by Carol Gilligan at the end of In a Different Voice, where in arguing ‘the need to delineate in women’s own terms the experience of their adult life’, she says: My own work in that direction indicates that the inclusion of women’s experience brings to developmental understanding a new perspective on relationships that changes the basic constructs of interpretation. The concept of identity expands to include the experience of interconnection. The moral domain is similarly enlarged by the inclusion of responsibility and care in relationships. And the underlying epistemology correspondingly shifts from the Greek ideal of knowledge as a correspondence between mind and form to the Biblical conception of knowing as a process of human relationship. (173) Barrett indeed learns to live according to such interconnection, responsibility and care, and comes to know ‘as a process of human relationship’. Whether or not Percy would recognize these traits as ‘feminine’, he has been able to portray them in action as transforming agents of Barrett’s character. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982).
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© 1989 Robert Detweiler
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Detweiler, R. (1989). Braking the Fall. In: Breaking the Fall. Studies in Literature and Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09991-7_3
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